Singapore will host U.S.-North Korea summit, nuclear issue to dominateSteve Holland, Matt Spetalnick WASHINGTON (Reuters), 11 May 18 Leaders of the United States and North Korea will meet for the first time when President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un hold a summit on June 12 in Singapore where the U.S. side will try to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons.
…….. “The highly anticipated meeting between Kim Jong Un and myself will take place in Singapore on June 12th. We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!” Trump wrote on Twitter…….
Trump is embarking on this high-stakes meeting with Kim after sending shockwaves through the world on Tuesday when he announced that the United States was pulling out of a 2015 accord imposing international oversight of Iran’s nuclear program.
The move raised questions over whether North Korea might now be less inclined to negotiate its own nuclear deal with Washington.
Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke by telephone on Wednesday and the White House said the two leaders “affirmed the shared goal of North Korea abandoning its illicit weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs” and remained committed to cooperating with South Korea.
Japan worries that it could be the target of any first-use of nuclear weapons by Pyongyang.
……… Kim recently promised to suspend missile tests and shut a nuclear bomb test site.
North Korea is still technically at war with the United States and its ally South Korea because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a treaty.
The choice of Singapore will put the summit on friendly turf for Trump, as the island nation is a strong U.S. ally and the U.S. Navy frequently visits its port.
The wealthy financial and shipping hub is seen as a gateway between Asia and the West and has been called the “Switzerland of Asia,” in contrast to North Korea’s isolated economy that its leaders now want to modernize.
Or, he’s making the rest of the world think he is by arranging a performance for the satellites that pass overhead.
Satellite images taken since last month’s inter-Korean summit show a steady reduction in the number of buildings around North Korea’s known nuclear test site, built under Mount Mantap in the Punggye-ri area in the north of the country.
“At the very least, this a welcome PR move,” said Jeffrey Lewis, head of the East Asia program at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California.
“Over the past two weeks, five or six buildings have inexplicably come down,” Lewis said, citing commercial satellite images from the San Francisco-based firm Planet Labs that have a resolution comparable to Google maps. “Something is clearly happening there.”
As part of the extraordinary rapprochement now going on, North Korea has vowed to dismantle the test site, where all six of its nuclear detonations have taken place, this month. But as with so many things about North Korea, it’s difficult to tell how much of this is wheat and how much is chaff.
Kim made the pledge during a historic summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, which laid the groundwork for a meeting between Kim and President Donald Trump that will likely take place in the next month or so.
Kim said he would invite security experts and journalists to the North to observe the closure of the site, the South’s presidential Blue House said.
All six of North Korea’s nuclear tests have taken place deep under the mountain at Punggye-ri, with five of them occurring in the tunnel complex accessed through an entrance known as the north portal. There are two other entrances to the site, the west and south portals.
The last test, in September last year, was so huge that some experts wondered if Mount Mantap was suffering from “tired mountain syndrome” and had become unusable. But numerous nuclear experts have cast doubt on that theory, noting that even if the tunnels leading to the north portal were unusable, the other two entrances could still be operational.
Tunnelling and activity at the west portal had been visible as recently as April 20, a week before the inter-Korean summit, according to an analysis for 38 North, a website devoted to North Korea.
There are clusters of buildings at the portals, including administration buildings and a command center, as well as smaller buildings.
The big, main buildings are still there but the smaller, more peripheral ones at the north and south portals, the entrances to the main tunnels, have come down, Lewis said.
This could be part of the preparations for inviting journalists and experts to watch the closure of the site, which, Lewis said, could be as simple – and as reversible – as blocking the portals.
“Shutting down the test site is something they can easily do. It’s just tunnels so they can seal the entrances – but they can also unseal them,” he said.
“And the tunnels are always going to be there,” he added, unless North Korea blows up the whole site.
Still, analysts wanting to be optimistic about the diplomatic process say that declaring the site finished and taking some steps towards closing it would support their theory that Kim is making an effort, just like this week’s release of three Americans who had been held in North Korea.
But sceptics say that closing a test site that might well be spent is just cosmetic.
A group of Chinese scientists last month said they believe the test site had collapsed after September’s huge test, which caused an earthquake so big that satellites caught images of the mountain above the site actually moving.
North Korea claimed to have detonated a hydrogen bomb, which would be exponentially more powerful than the atomic devices previously tested, and experts said the size of the earthquake suggested that it had indeed been a hydrogen, or thermonuclear, explosion.
Adding to theory that the site has outlived its utility is new research from scientists from the Earth Observatory of Singapore at Nanyang Technical University, who claim to have found evidence that the damage at Mount Mantap was more substantial than other research shows.
In their study, which will be published in the journal Science on Thursday, they argued that by using satellite radar imagery to supplement ground-based seismological readings they were able to gain a more accurate picture of the September 3 test.
Sylvain Barbot, a researcher with the Earth Observatory of Singapore, wrote in an e-mail that the nuclear test last year was so large that “we could ‘feel’ it from space.”
The amount of shaking that accompanied the explosion was so severe that traditional radar measurements were inaccurate, Barbot said, and his team had to use unusual techniques to compensate for significant changes in the landscape.
By using these techniques, the researchers were able to estimate a depth for the nuclear detonation: Around 450 metres, beneath the summit of Mount Mantap. Researchers then combined this information with seismological readings to come up with an estimated yield for the weapon of between 120 kilotons to 304 kilotons.
Much of this range would be far higher than officials from the United States and South Korea estimate.
The researchers also found evidence that a significant part of Mount Mantap had collapsed after the explosion, supporting the Chinese study. A “very large” part of the facility had collapsed, Barbot said, “not merely a tunnel or two.”
An underground North Korean nuclear test in September last year exploded with 10 times the energy of the atomic bomb that exploded over Nagasaki in 1945.
It also caused the overlying mountain peak to sink by half a metre and shift about 3.5 metres south.
Key points:
North Korea detonated a nuclear bomb under Mt Mantap on September 3, 2017
Using satellite measurements and seismic data, geophysicists calculated the strength of the test and its location — the first time satellite radar has been used this way
The blast was big enough to cause an earthquake and deform the mountain above
These are conclusions drawn by geophysicists, who used satellite radar and instruments that pick up waves travelling through the earth, to calculate the explosion’s depth and strength.
In the journal Science today, they also report signs that a subterranean tunnel system at the test site collapsed 8.5 minutes after the bomb detonated.
In the past, satellite technology — called synthetic radar aperture imagery — has mapped how the ground stretches and warps after earthquakes.
But this is the first time it has been used to examine a nuclear bomb test site, according to Teng Wang, study co-author and a geophysicist at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
Since the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1996, nine nuclear tests have taken place.
Six of these were by North Korea, five of which were at its Mt Mantap facility in the country’s north.
The bombs were detonated in chambers tunnelled into the mountain itself — a granite peak that extends upwards just over 2,200 metres.
But this means the details of the tests, such as the energy produced by the bombs, have been largely unknown outside North Korea — until now.
Eye in the sky, ear to the ground
Dr Wang and his colleagues suspected they could deduce the strength and precise location of the bomb test on September 3 last year, which triggered a magnitude-6.3 earthquake.
Clandestine nuclear activities are tracked by a global monitoring system of sensors that pick up the faint shivers and shudders generated by distant underground blasts and earthquakes.
But while these instruments are capable of picking up the wave signature of a bomb blast thousands of kilometres away, more information is needed to pinpoint exactly where an explosion has taken place.
So in the weeks after the September North Korean bomb test, Dr Wang and his colleagues received images of the Mt Mantap terrain before and after the test, snapped by the German TerraSAR-X satellite.
To map the bumps and dips on the Earth’s entire surface, TerraSAR-X pings radar towards the ground and measures how long it before the signal is bounced back up again.
“As long as the ground is deformed, we can measure it from space using synthetic radar aperture,” Dr Wang said.
Combined with a bit of nifty mathematical modelling — the first time anyone’s modelled an underground nuclear test with radar data — he and his colleagues got a fix on the exact location of the detonation site.
This is a highlight of the work, said Hrvoje Tkalcic, a geophysicist at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the study.
“What’s always difficult is pinpointing an exact location [of a bomb test],” Professor Tkalcic said.
Dr Wang and his team calculated that the top of the mountain subsided about half a metre after the September test, and parts of it shuffled south.
To manage this deformation, the bomb released the energy equivalent to between 109,000 and 276,000 tonnes of TNT in a chamber 450 metres below Mt Mantap’s peak.
The “Fat Man” bomb that exploded over Nagasaki yielded an energy level equivalent to 20,000 tonnes.
Among the data, they found the seismic shivers of a second, smaller event — an aftershock that appeared 700 metres south of, and 8.5 minutes after, the explosion.
The waves produced by the aftershock weren’t consistent with an explosion; rather, it looked like the ground had imploded.
This, the geophysicists suggest, “likely indicates the collapse of the tunnel system of the test site”.
While Dr Wang and his team used data from seismic monitoring systems in China and the surrounding area, Australia has one of the best in the world, Professor Tkalcic said: the Warramunga monitoring station in the Northern Territory, near Tennant Creek.
It’s almost smack bang in the centre of the continent, in an incredibly quiet part of the world, seismically speaking; far from tectonic plate edges, cities and the shoreline, where waves crashing on the coast create seismic noise.
It uses an array of buried instruments to pick up waves that travel through the ground, acting as a giant antenna to amplify weak signals.
“They’re used in the same way as astronomers use arrays of antennas to look at deep space. It’s just that our antennas are pointed to the centre of the earth,” Professor Tkalcic said.
There is also an infrasound detection system at Warramunga station, which detects waves that travel through the atmosphere produced by bomb blasts.
The data is transmitted by satellite to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation in Vienna, where it is monitored round the clock.
So how do geophysicists know if seismic waves are caused by bomb blasts and not, say, an earthquake or landslide?
In a subterranean explosion, the ground is pushed outwards and compressed, sending a particular type of wave through the ground, Professor Tkalcic said.
An earthquake’s seismic signature is different. If two plates collide, rub against each other or slip, they send out another type of wave.
“We can tell if the first motion was predominantly a compression or if it was a shear type of motion,” Professor Tkalcic said.
In this file photo, the No. 3 reactor, center left, of Shikoku Electric Power Co. Ikata Nuclear Power Station is seen from a Mainichi Shimbun helicopter on March 28, 2017.
IKATA, Ehime — Water containing radioactive materials has leaked from a purification system inside of a stalled nuclear reactor here, Shikoku Electric Power Co. and the Ehime Prefectural Government announced on May 9.
The leak occurred in the auxiliary building of the No. 3 reactor at the Ikata Nuclear Power Station in the town of Ikata, Ehime Prefecture. According to the prefectural government and Shikoku Electric, the coolant water was found to be leaking from the pressure gauge stop valve for the purification system at around 2:10 a.m. on May 9.
The radiation level of the materials in the roughly 130 milliliters of escaped water measured 20 becquerels, far below the standard for filing a report to the central government. The utility and Ehime Prefecture said there is no reported leakage outside of the facility, nor was there any danger posed to employees or the surrounding environment. Regardless, the reason for the leak will be investigated thoroughly.
The No. 3 Reactor at the facility was restarted in August 2016. However, while the rector was undergoing a scheduled inspection in December 2017, a temporary injunction was handed down by the Hiroshima High Court that halted operation at the site.
(Japanese original by Aoi Hanazawa, Matsuyama Bureau)
Japan’s 8th reactor is back online. Kansai Electric Power Company on Wednesday restarted a reactor at the Ohi plant in Fukui Prefecture, central Japan.
At the plant, workers pulled out the control rods that suppress atomic fission of the No.4 reactor.
The facility is expected to reach criticality early Thursday, begin power generation and transmission on Friday and go into commercial operation in early June.
The reactor had complied with new government regulations put in place following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident.
Two months earlier, the utility reactivated the No.3 reactor at the plant. Two more reactors are running at its Takahama plant about 13 kilometers west of Ohi.
Although they all passed the government’s new regulations, attention is now focused on the threat of multiple accidents at these plants in the event of an earthquake and tsunami.
This summer, the government plans to hold its first drill based on a scenario that accidents have occurred simultaneously at the Ohi and Takahama plants.
In 2014, the Fukui District Court ruled against putting the No.3 and No.4 reactors at Ohi back online. It said estimated tremors of possible quakes at the plant are too optimistic. The ruling was appealed to a higher court, which has yet to decide the issue.
Nuclear Inspectors Would Face Monumental Task in N.Korea http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2018/05/08/2018050801221.html By Cho Yi-jun May 08, 2018
The U.S.’ call for a “permanent, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” of North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs would pose a monumental task for international inspectors.
U.S. officials project “the most extensive inspection campaign in the history of nuclear disarmament, one that would have to delve into a program that stretches back more than half a century and now covers square miles of industrial sites and hidden tunnels across the mountainous North,” according to the New York Times on Sunday.
The success of any verification hinges on accurately assessing North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile stockpiles, most of which are hidden away. Already U.S. intelligence agents are going all out to gather data about the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile facilities.
The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency recently launched a project that tracks the movements of all vehicles in and out of North Korean military installations, CNN reported. Washington has also monitored North Korean responses to American fighter planes flying overhead to arrive at an overall assessment of the North’s hidden military bases.
One diplomatic source in Washington said the U.S. “may have assessed North Korea’s secret military installations much more accurately than the North thinks.”
The New York Times cited the RAND Corporation as arriving at no better assessment than that North Korea has 20 to 60 nuclear warheads and around 40 to 100 nuclear facilities, while one nuclear facility has more than 400 buildings.
“While there is no question Iran hid much of its weapons-designing past, North Korea has concealed programs on a far larger scale,” the daily said.
The RAND Corporation predicts that it would take 273,000 U.S. troops just to locate and secure North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction, which is more than the number of American soldiers deployed in Iraq at the peak of the U.S. invasion.
It warned that the International Atomic Energy Agency has only 300 inspectors, and 80 of them are already assigned to monitoring activities in Iran. If the North agrees in principle to denuclearize, the IAEA will have a huge task simply finding the personnel.
North Korea could easily conceal highly enriched uranium which could be used to produce a nuclear bomb, and it would be virtually impossible to find if the North fails to cooperate.
Justice Party lawmaker Kim Jong-dae, who recently visited Washington, told reporters that North Korea has “tens of thousands of facilities related to nuclear and missile development, while there are around 10,000 underground tunnels and storage facilities in the Mt. Baekdu area.”
“Realistically, the U.S.-North Korea summit should discuss nuclear arms reduction rather than complete dismantlement,” he added.
Mac Thornberry, head of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, told Fox New that he is “very skeptical” that North Korea will completely dismantle its weapons of mass destruction and advised the U.S. to “prepare for the worst.”
But others warned that North Korea could face a grim future if it attempts to fool the U.S.
Hardline U.S. lawmaker Lindsey Graham said in a radio interview that North Korea played “every president before -– Clinton, Bush, all of them” but warned that Pyongyang would regret it if it tries to dupe the Trump administration since this would mean the “end of the North Korean regime.”
TOKYO — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wants to talk to President Trump about “phased and synchronous measures” to deal with the standoff over the North’s nuclear program, Chinese state media reported Tuesday after Kim made his second visit to China in as many months.
This wording, coupled with Kim’s desire to “eventually achieve denuclearization and lasting peace on the peninsula,” will ring alarm bells in Washington as it reinforces suspicions that the North Korean leader will ask Trump to take simultaneous steps to reduce tensions.
The U.S. president said Tuesday in Washington that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was en route to North Korea to finalize a date and location for a meeting between Trump and Kim. It would be the first such parley between a sitting American president and a North Korean leader.
“This wording about a ‘phased approach’ shows that this is going to be a process,” said Patrick McEachern, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center who previously worked on North Korea at the State Department.
“There are no home runs here. Success in diplomacy with North Korea is going to be a series of singles, with some strikeouts and errors along the way,” he said.
There is considerable skepticism among analysts that Kim, having tried so hard to get a credible nuclear weapons program, is about to give it all up — certainly not without extracting major concessions from the United States. That could include reducing the U.S. military footprint in South Korea.
Kim made the remarks during a two-day visit to the Chinese port city of Dalian, not far from the North Korean border, where he met with President Xi Jinping, Xinhua reported Tuesday night. His younger sister and close aide, Kim Yo Jong, also was seen at the meetings………
South Korea has repeatedly said that the North is willing to discuss its nuclear program in talks with the United States, although “denuclearization” has not been defined. The language in the April 27 agreement has many American analysts worried that Kim will insist on U.S. military drawdowns from South Korea as part of any deal.
Although there is considerable skepticism in the United States and Japan about whether North Korea is genuine in its detente efforts, analysts point out that Kim appears to want to move on from nuclear to economic development.
“I do think North Korea would have a very strong interest to pivot to economic development,” Zhao said. “In this regard, it would have a strong motivation to build much stronger economic ties with China, South Korea and Russia.”
The South Korean government is exploring ways to increase economic cooperation with North Korea without breaching international sanctions or earning the ire of Trump. Reports from the Chinese-North Korean border suggest that Chinese authorities have already lost much of their enthusiasm for enforcing existing sanctions.
(Mainichi Japan) TOKYO –– Construction plans for an anti-terror and emergency response center for the No. 1 reactor at the Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s Sendai nuclear plant were accepted by the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) on May 7.
Formal approval for the emergency center at the plant in Satsumasendai, Kagoshima Prefecture, is expected soon. Nuclear plant operators are required to build emergency response facilities within a certain timeframe under new safety standards that took effect in 2013. The plans for the Sendai plant are the first to be approved by the NRA.
The NRA reviewed a number of Kyushu Electric construction plans for the response center, including for maintenance equipment, and accepted some of them. Details have not been made available for safety reasons, but the center will be built some distance from the Sendai plant’s reactor buildings. With potential terror attacks in mind, the center will be equipped with water pumps, generators and an emergency control room allowing staff to continue to cool the reactors remotely.
The NRA requires that the emergency response centers be strong enough to withstand being struck by an aircraft, or be located a significant distance from a plant’s reactors, and that they have emergency control rooms.
At first, the NRA had demanded that the response centers be established by July this year. However, with many plants unable to meet the deadline, in November 2015 the agency switched to requiring the centers be set up “within five years of the approval of detailed upgrade plans for the reactors themselves.”
So far, the NRA has green-lit the restarts of seven reactors at five plants, which are now all on the deadline clock to open emergency response centers. The Sendai plant’s No. 1 unit is one of those reactors, and Kyushu Electric has until March 2020 to complete the response center there. If it does not meet the deadline, it will be compelled to shut off the No. 1 reactor until the response center is finished. The deadline for the plant’s No. 2 reactor is in May the same year.
The cost of building the response centers has swelled over time, with those for the Sendai plant’s two reactors set to reach roughly 220 billion yen — five times the initial estimate. Kansai Electric Power Co. is also expected to shell out some 222.7 billion yen for response centers for the four reactors at its Takahama nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture.
(Japanese original by Riki Iwama, Science & Environment News Department)
The findings come just two weeks ahead of a critical decision at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) review on Japan’s human rights record and commitments to evacuees from the nuclear disaster.
“In all of the areas we surveyed, including where people are permitted to live, the radiation levels are such that if it was in a nuclear facility it would require strict controls. Yet this is public land. Citizens, including children and pregnant women returning to their contaminated homes, are at risk of receiving radiation doses equivalent to one chest X-ray every week. This is unacceptable and a clear violation of their human rights, ” said Jan Vande Putte, radiation specialist with Greenpeace Belgium and leader of the survey project.
Greenpeace Japan conducted the investigations in September and October last year, measuring tens of thousands of data points around homes, forests, roads and farmland in the open areas of Namie and Iitate, as well as inside the closed Namie exclusion zone. The government plans to open up small areas of the exclusion zone, including Obori and Tsushima, for human habitation in 2023. The survey shows the decontamination program to be ineffective, combined with a region that is 70-80% mountainous forest which cannot be decontaminated.
Key finding from the Greenpeace Japan survey:
Even after decontamination, in four of six houses in Iitate, the average radiation levels were three times higher than the government long term target. Some areas showed an increase from the previous year, which could have come from recontamination.
At a house in Tsushima in the Namie exclusion zone, despite it being used as a test bed for decontamination in 2011-12, a dose of 7 mSv per year is estimated, while the international limit for public exposure in a non-accidental situation is 1 mSv/y. This reveals the ineffectiveness of decontamination work.
At a school in Namie town, where the evacuation order was lifted, decontamination had failed to significantly reduce radiation risks, with levels in a nearby forest with an average dose rate of more than 10 mSv per year. Children are particularly at risk from radiation exposure.
In one zone in Obori, the maximum radiation measured at 1m would give the equivalent of 101 mSv per year or one hundred times the recommended maximum annual limit, assuming a person would stay there for a full year These high levels are a clear threat, in the first instance, to thousands of decontamination workers who will spend many hours in that area.
This contamination presents a long term risk, and means that the government’s long-term radiation target (1ｍSv/year which is equivalent to 0.23μSv/hour) are unlikely to be reached before at least the middle of the century in many areas that are currently open and into next century for the exclusion zone of Namie. In an admission of failure, the government has recently initiated a review of its radiation target levels with the aim of raising it even higher.
The Government’s policy to effectively force people to return by ending housing and other financial support is not working, with population return rates of 2.5% and 7% in Namie and Iitate respectively as of December 2017.
In November last year, the UNHRC’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on Japan issued four recommendations on Fukushima issues. Member governments (Austria, Portugal, Mexico and Germany) called for Japan to respect the human rights of Fukushima evacuees and adopt strong measures to reduce the radiation risks to citizens, in particular women and children and to fully support self evacuees. Germany called on Japan to return to maximum permissible radiation of 1 mSv per year, while the current government policy in Japan is to permit up to 20 mSv per year. If this recommendation was applied, the Japanese government’s lifting of evacuation orders would have be halted.
“Our radiation survey results provides evidence that there is a significant risk to health and safety for any returning evacuee. The Japanese government must stop forcing people to go back home and protect their rights,” said Kazue Suzuki, Energy Campaigner at Greenpeace Japan. “It is essential that the government fully accept and immediately apply the recommendations at the United Nations.”
Foreign Minister Wang Yi backs plans announced by Kim Jong-un as China expresses wish for cooperation, despite its support of UN sanctions Laura Zhouhttps://twitter.com/laurachouSCMP, 03 May, 2018 Beijing will support North Korea’s efforts to rebuild its economy, China’s foreign minister has said as the North pledged to suspend nuclear testing and prioritise economic growth.
Wang Yi said in his meeting with North Korean counterpart Ri Yong-ho that the two allies would strengthen strategic communications and China would “continue to play a due and positive role in the political process for political settlement of the peninsula issues”, a statement by the Chinese foreign ministry said.
On the first day of his two-day visit to Pyongyang on Wednesday, Wang reaffirmed the pledge to deepen traditional relations between the neighbours, made by President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during Kim’s visit to Beijing in March.
“Traditional friendship between China and North Korea is the mutual good fortune of the two sides, and it is a strategic choice to inherit and develop the traditional friendly relations,” Wang was quoted as saying.
“China would work together with North Korea … to enhance communications and coordination between the political and diplomatic departments of the two sides, and push forward practical cooperation on economy and trade.”
Ri told Wang that Kim values the traditional friendship with China, and that North Korea would like to keep close communication with China on denuclearisation and the peace process on the peninsula, according to the statement by the Chinese foreign ministry.
The visit by Wang has come at a time when Beijing and Pyongyang have been working to repair the relations that were strained by Kim’s repeated nuclear tests and Beijing’s support for a series of stringent UN sanctions.
…….
Lu Chao, a Korean affairs expert at Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, said that China’s support of economic development in North Korea was in response to Kim’s pledge to give up nuclear weapons and shift to economic development.
“This is not contradicting the UN sanctions, because the support, as well as the recent improvement in the bilateral relations between China and North Korea, only came on condition that North Korea agrees to give up its nuclear weapon programme and move to develop its economy,” Lu said.
FoE Japan 2nd May 2018, Urgent Joint Statement: Hitachi’s nuclear export transfers risks to both Japanese and British people while companies get profits. Hitachi’s
Chairman Nakanishi is reportedly going to visit British Prime Minister
Teresa May on 3rd May to ask the U.K. government to take a direct stake in
Wylfa Newydd nuclear power project in Anglesey, Wales.
Hitachi’s struggle just shows the risks of the nuclear power project is simply huge. While
putting huge risks and cost onto both Japanese and British people, it is
unacceptable that companies and banks take profit. Friends of the Earth
Japan jointly with People Against Wylfa B released an urgent statement.
The report says Hitachi is going to ask not only for direct investment but also
an assurance for a power purchase agreement. Hitachi’s struggle just
shows the risks of the nuclear power project is simply huge. In February,
Mr. Nakanishi already expressed the view that the project would not happen
without government commitment and stated “Both UK and Japanese
governments understand that the project would not go on without the
commitment by the governments”.
To reduce the risk of the project, the project is said to be insured by Nippon Export and Investment Insurance
(NEXI), 100 percent Japanese government owned export credit agency. In
addition to huge construction cost, nuclear projects are associated with
various risks such as accidents, increased cost for tougher regulations,
opposition from local people, radioactive waste management and so on.
Risks are too huge to manage. Thus, it is clear that companies should decide to
retreat from the project. While transferring risks of the project to
people, it is unacceptable that the companies and banks take profits.
The Spokesperson from People Against Wylfa B, Dylan Morgan says; “Don’t pour
good money in to the bottomless black hole of nuclear power. This is an old
fashioned, dirty, dangerous and extortionately expensive technology. The
Fukushima triple explosions and meltdowns has and will continue to cost the
people of Japan greatly. There is no end in sight for this continuing
tragedy, which means that no new nuclear reactors are going to be built in
Japan. It is unacceptable that Japan wish to export this deadly technology
to another state in order to keep Japan in the nuclear club.”
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, alongside the bombing of Nagasaki days later, one of the deadliest military actions undertaken in human history. A new study has been able to use human tissue samples to understand precisely how much radiation victims absorbed in their bones. It’s nearly twice the lethal amount.
A weapon drastically different than any other ever used in war, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima instantly killed over 100,000 people and left thousands more dealing with radiation fallout. By the end of 1945, it is estimated that 160,000 people had been killed directly from the bombing. Several historians have argued that while the bombs effectively ended World War II, their unprecedented destructive capabilities started the next global conflict, the Cold War, at the exact same time.
Attempting to measure the damage done to Hiroshima by the atomic bomb overwhelmed science for decades. There were simply no computers or radiation-measuring devices capable of understanding the damage. Personal stories, like those of the survivors describe in John Hershey’s Hiroshimaand art works of survivors, took hold as the dominant narratives.
But that didn’t mean scientists weren’t trying. When the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) formed in 1947, the agency quickly realized it would need long term study to understand what had happened. Japanese scientists like E. T. Arakawa and Takenobu Higashimura were releasing studies about the effects of the bombings by the early 1960s.
In 1973, Brazilian physicist Sérgio Mascarenhas was trying to date archaeological items in his home country based on radiation absorption. Radiation occurs naturally in sand through elements like thorium, and techniques like radiocarbon dating use similar principles.
However, Mascarenhas realized that this method might have applications beyond archaeological items. He flew to Hiroshima and, with help from the Institute of Nuclear Medicine in Hiroshima, was able to obtain a jawbone from a bombing victim’s body. While he gained some understanding of what the victim’s body had endured, technical issues stood in his way. He was unable to separate background radiation levels from the bomb blast radiation.
Flash forward four decades later and Angela Kinoshita of Universidade do Sagrado Coração in São Paulo State has reexamined the jawbone using modern technology. Kinoshita’s team was able to determine that the jawbone absorbed 9.46 grays of radiation. A mere 5 grays can be fatal. That number lines up with measurements taken of bricks and other inorganic objects measured at the time. The work is published in PLOS ONE.
Beyond gaining a better understanding of what happened to the victims of Hiroshima, who ranged from prisoners of war to soldiers to civilians, the study offers insight into what might happen if a nuclear weapon was ever used again.
“Imagine someone in New York planting an ordinary bomb with a small amount of radioactive material stuck to the explosive. Techniques like this can help identify who has been exposed to radioactive fallout and needs treatment,” says study co-author Oswaldo Baffa of the University of São Paulo in a press statement. Source: Discover
Seoul: North Korea’s nuclear test site is fully operational, a specialised website reports, corroborating a similar announcement by the North Korean leader earlier.
Pyongyang offered to permanently close down the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in May in the presence of international observers and journalists after the two Koreas agreed on a complete denuclearisation of the Peninsula during a historical summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Friday.
“The two mountainous areas accessible by the South and West Portals remain viable, and could support future underground nuclear testing,” the website 38North said after analysing new radar data about the site.
The report also confirmed that the two central tunnels of the site were in good condition, contrary to earlier reports by Chinese experts who said they could have been irreversibly damaged after the sixth and most powerful underground nuclear test carried out by Pyongyang in September.
The report also confirmed Kim’s earlier assertion that Pyongyang was shutting down not defunct but rather operational nuclear facilities, including the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, the centre where it carried out all of its six nuclear tests.
During the historical summit, Kim had proposed that the site should be shut down publicly to highlight Pyongyang’s commitment to denuclearisation.
38North said that although the north portal – used by Pyongyang for five of the six tests – seems to have been abandoned, they had detected construction of new tunnels in another section of the site.
38North – a website linked to the John Hopkins University in the United States – said that the new tunnels could allow the use of underground installations, dismissing analysis by other experts who said North Korea had announced the closure because the facility had become completely unusable.
Kim Jong-un promises to close North Korea’s nuclear test site in May in front of the world, ABC News , 29 Apr 18
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has vowed to shut down the country’s nuclear test site in May and open the process to experts and journalists from South Korea and the United States, Seoul’s presidential office has said.
Key points:
Singapore is being considered as a location for the Trump-Kim summit
Mr Trump said he would continue to sanctions pressure on Pyongyang
He is also providing the Japanese Prime Minister with updates on the negotiations
Mr Kim made the comments during his summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Friday (local time), where he also expressed optimism about his anticipated meeting with Donald Trump.
The North Korean leader said the US President would learn he is “not a person” to fire missiles toward the United States, Mr Moon’s spokesman Yoon Young-chan said.
During the summit, the two Korean leaders promised to work toward the “complete denuclearisation” of the Korean Peninsula, but made no references to verification or timetables…………
North Korea suspends nuclear tests, will change time zone
Mr Kim reacted to scepticism that the North would only be closing down the northernmost test tunnel at the site in Punggye-ri, which some analysts say became too unstable to conduct further underground detonations following the country’s sixth and most powerful nuclear test in September.
In his conversation with the South Korean President, Mr Kim denied that he would be merely clearing out damaged goods, saying that the site also has two new tunnels that are larger than previous testing facilities, Mr Yoon said.
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