quote Originally posted by dennis_6: .... Phonedawgz, did in fact claim to have worked at a nuclear power plant in the past for 6 months, and claimed he left the job, because it was boring. I believe the reason he is playing industry shill, is he stated he regrets leaving the industry and hopes to return to it...

Go for it Dennis. Tell me where I said I stated I "regret(s) leaving the industry and hope(s) to return to it'

quote ...pro down play so I can get another job in the field.

Your wacko for even thinking that somehow my posts on this forum would give me any favor for getting a job in the industry. I am not looking for a job in the field. You have made this up and it is not true.

It's as simple as that.

While you're at it, look in the past 20+ pages and see if you can find any posts that aligns yourself with 'being pro nuclear power".

[This message has been edited by phonedawgz (edited 08-08-2011).]

quote Originally posted by phonedawgz: Your wacko for even thinking that somehow my posts on this forum would give me any favor for getting a job in the industry. I am not looking for a job in the field. You have made this up and it is not true. It's as simple as that. While you're at it, look in the past 20+ pages and see if you can find any posts that aligns yourself with 'being pro nuclear power".

I pretty sure when someone states that it was a mistake leaving, shows regret and a desire to return. I stated something along the lines of you didn't want people to pull a germany over here and close our nuclear power plants. Outside of sarcasm about TEPCO paying you for PR, I never said you were being rewarded by the nuclear power industry.


Since we are playing the show me game, show me where I stated all nuclear plants should be shut down and all nuclear weapons destroyed?

[This message has been edited by dennis_6 (edited 08-08-2011).]

quote Originally posted by dennis_6: I pretty sure when someone states that it was a mistake leaving, shows regret and a desire to return. ...

Wrong again Dennis_6

I was in training 20 years ago. I don't want to go back and go into an entry level training job 20 years later. I do at this time wish I would have stayed in the training position and moved forward. There is a difference.

I see why you have such a hard time with other logical problems. You make conclusions that are without basis.

[This message has been edited by phonedawgz (edited 08-08-2011).]

Dennis, try to avoid letting phonedawgz troll you into an argument, it's what he lives for and it's all he does in this thread. He contributes nothing of value here.

Meanwhile, have you heard anything about the bodies and burial/cremations? I remember that thousands of bodies were in the contamination zones and couldn't be recovered and cremated, so critical to the faiths of most Japanese, because they were too highly contaminated with radiation and/or radionuclides. I'm guessing by now that the flesh has rotted away and been eaten by carrion animals as well as abandoned pet dogs and cats (which are now in turn contaminated? That's another mystery), so theoretically bones would be easier to recover and dispose of.

Well here is a July 4 story of recovery of bodies in the exclusion zone. Looks like they dropped the idea that the bodies were too contaminated to retrieve. If the people had died before the nuclear accident, the bodies would be basically at worst contaminated with 'radioactive dust'.

The idea that the bodies were too contaminated to retrieve seemed pretty far fetched right from the start.

I do find it interesting that the author used the phrase "racing today to find thousands of missing bodies before they decompose". The bodies were there decomposing for a month already by that time.

quote JAPANESE police are racing today to find thousands of missing bodies before they decompose along a stretch of tsunami-pummeled coast that has been largely off-limits because of a radiation-leaking nuclear plant. Nearly a month after a 9.0-earthquake generated the tsunami along Japan’s northeastern coast, more than 14,700 people are still missing. Many of those may have been washed out to sea and will never be found. In the days just after the March 11 disaster, searchers gingerly picked through mountains of tangled debris, hoping to find survivors. Heavier machinery has since been called in, but unpredictable tides of radiation from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex have slowed progress and often forced authorities to abandon the search, especially within a 12-mile (20km) evacuation zone around the plant. Officials now say there’s not much time left to find and identify the dead, and are ramping up those efforts. Ryoichi Tsunoda, a police spokesman in Fukushima prefecture, where the plant is located, said: We have to find bodies now as they are decomposing. This is a race against time and against the threat of nuclear radiation. Up to 25,000 people are believed to have been killed, of which 12,500 have been confirmed.There is expected to be some overlap in the dead and missing tolls because not all of the bodies have been identified. Recent progress at the plant — which the tsunami flooded — appears to have slowed the release of radiation. Early yesterday, technicians there plugged a crack that had been gushing contaminated water into the Pacific. Radiation levels in waters off the coast fell dramatically later in the day, though contaminated water continues to pool throughout the complex, often thwarting work there.

Oh and the idea that I haven't contributed to this thread. Go back and read my posts. You guys had no clue when this thing started. Like the 'cement cap' thread. Or that people didn't understand the difference between Fukushima's and Chernobyl's technologies.

[This message has been edited by phonedawgz (edited 08-08-2011).]

Report: Japan’s Fukushima reactor possibly melted twice
8 August 2011 745 views One Comment BY: BNO News

TOKYO (BNO NEWS) -- According to a study, the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant might have suffered a second nuclear meltdown, Kyodo news agency reported Monday.

According to the study, which was conducted by nuclear safety expert Fumiya Tanabe, fuel inside one of the plant's nuclear reactors might have breached the bottom of a pressure vessel after melting again.

The fuel is believed to have been kept cool at the bottom of the pressure vessel since a nuclear meltdown was confirmed, but the cooling method would need further review if most of the fuel at the No. 3 reactor has fallen into the containment vessel underneath the reactor, the study said.

The Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), which operates the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, had previously confirmed that nuclear meltdowns were assumed in the cores of the Nos. 1 and 3 reactors. Tepco had been keeping the reactors cooled and solidified at the bottom of each reactor pressure vessel by injecting water.

Last Thursday, Vice Minister for Economy, Trade, and Industry Kazuo Matsunaga, Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency chief Nobuaki Terasaka, and Agency for Natural Resources and Energy chief Tetsuhiro Hosono were sacked, as the government of Japan has been strongly criticized due to the handling of the electricity shortage, as well as the slow response into resolving issues directly related with the nuclear crisis.

Japanese Interior Minister Banri Kaieda, meanwhile, had previously stated that he would resign as a way to take responsibility of the situation. His ministry is in charge of energy policy, but despite his announcement, Kaieda has not been clear of when he would step down.

Japan's nuclear crisis began since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was severely damaged on March 11 when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and a subsequent tsunami devastated the country. The disaster disabled the cooling systems of the plant, and radioactive elements leaked into the sea and were later found in water, air and food products in some parts of Japan. Subsequent power shortages throughout the country have further complicated recovery efforts.

At least 23,482 people were killed, while 8,069 people remain missing. There are still more than 88,000 people who are staying in shelters in 21 prefectures around Japan.

According to the Japan Research Institute, the country's reconstruction efforts will cost between 14 trillion yen ($174.58 billion) and 18 trillion yen ($224.46 billion) in the upcoming 10 years, including 9.1 trillion yen ($113.47 billion) this year alone. Japan has already allocated a 4 trillion yen ($48.89 billion) emergency budget to finance the early phase of reconstruction efforts following the disaster.

On June 23, the government also announced a budget of 2 trillion yen ($24.8 billion) to be distributed to cover the massive compensation claims since the beginning of the disaster being faced by Tepco, which operates the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

(Copyright 2011 by BNO News B.V. All rights reserved. Info: sales@bnonews.com.)
http://channel6newsonline.c...ssibly-melted-twice/

Nice story

This article implies that "At least 23,482 people were killed, while 8,069 people remain missing" because of the nuclear accident.

This is a classic line also "Tepco had been keeping the reactors cooled and solidified at the bottom of each reactor pressure vessel by injecting water"

quote Originally posted by dennis_6: Report: Japan’s Fukushima reactor possibly melted twice 8 August 2011 745 views One Comment BY: BNO News TOKYO (BNO NEWS) -- According to a study, the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant might have suffered a second nuclear meltdown, Kyodo news agency reported Monday. According to the study, which was conducted by nuclear safety expert Fumiya Tanabe, fuel inside one of the plant's nuclear reactors might have breached the bottom of a pressure vessel after melting again. The fuel is believed to have been kept cool at the bottom of the pressure vessel since a nuclear meltdown was confirmed, but the cooling method would need further review if most of the fuel at the No. 3 reactor has fallen into the containment vessel underneath the reactor, the study said. The Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), which operates the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, had previously confirmed that nuclear meltdowns were assumed in the cores of the Nos. 1 and 3 reactors. Tepco had been keeping the reactors cooled and solidified at the bottom of each reactor pressure vessel by injecting water. Last Thursday, Vice Minister for Economy, Trade, and Industry Kazuo Matsunaga, Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency chief Nobuaki Terasaka, and Agency for Natural Resources and Energy chief Tetsuhiro Hosono were sacked, as the government of Japan has been strongly criticized due to the handling of the electricity shortage, as well as the slow response into resolving issues directly related with the nuclear crisis. Japanese Interior Minister Banri Kaieda, meanwhile, had previously stated that he would resign as a way to take responsibility of the situation. His ministry is in charge of energy policy, but despite his announcement, Kaieda has not been clear of when he would step down. Japan's nuclear crisis began since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was severely damaged on March 11 when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and a subsequent tsunami devastated the country. The disaster disabled the cooling systems of the plant, and radioactive elements leaked into the sea and were later found in water, air and food products in some parts of Japan. Subsequent power shortages throughout the country have further complicated recovery efforts. At least 23,482 people were killed, while 8,069 people remain missing. There are still more than 88,000 people who are staying in shelters in 21 prefectures around Japan. According to the Japan Research Institute, the country's reconstruction efforts will cost between 14 trillion yen ($174.58 billion) and 18 trillion yen ($224.46 billion) in the upcoming 10 years, including 9.1 trillion yen ($113.47 billion) this year alone. Japan has already allocated a 4 trillion yen ($48.89 billion) emergency budget to finance the early phase of reconstruction efforts following the disaster. On June 23, the government also announced a budget of 2 trillion yen ($24.8 billion) to be distributed to cover the massive compensation claims since the beginning of the disaster being faced by Tepco, which operates the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. (Copyright 2011 by BNO News B.V. All rights reserved. Info: sales@bnonews.com.) http://channel6newsonline.c...ssibly-melted-twice/

[This message has been edited by phonedawgz (edited 08-08-2011).]

By NORIMITSU ONISHI and MARTIN FACKLER
Published: August 8, 2011


FUKUSHIMA, Japan — The day after a giant tsunami set off the continuing disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, thousands of residents at the nearby town of Namie gathered to evacuate.


Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.

The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that.

But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism. Japan’s political leaders at first did not know about the system and later played down the data, apparently fearful of having to significantly enlarge the evacuation zone — and acknowledge the accident’s severity.

“From the 12th to the 15th we were in a location with one of the highest levels of radiation,” said Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of Namie, which is about five miles from the nuclear plant. He and thousands from Namie now live in temporary housing in another town, Nihonmatsu. “We are extremely worried about internal exposure to radiation.”

The withholding of information, he said, was akin to “murder.”

In interviews and public statements, some current and former government officials have admitted that Japanese authorities engaged in a pattern of withholding damaging information and denying facts of the nuclear disaster — in order, some of them said, to limit the size of costly and disruptive evacuations in land-scarce Japan and to avoid public questioning of the politically powerful nuclear industry. As the nuclear plant continues to release radiation, some of which has slipped into the nation’s food supply, public anger is growing at what many here see as an official campaign to play down the scope of the accident and the potential health risks.

Seiki Soramoto, a lawmaker and former nuclear engineer to whom Prime Minister Naoto Kan turned for advice during the crisis, blamed the government for withholding forecasts from the computer system, known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi.

“In the end, it was the prime minister’s office that hid the Speedi data,” he said. “Because they didn’t have the knowledge to know what the data meant, and thus they did not know what to say to the public, they thought only of their own safety, and decided it was easier just not to announce it.”

In an interview, Goshi Hosono, the minister in charge of the nuclear crisis, dismissed accusations that political considerations had delayed the release of the early Speedi data. He said that they were not disclosed because they were incomplete and inaccurate, and that he was presented with the data for the first time only on March 23.

“And on that day, we made them public,” said Mr. Hosono, who was one of the prime minister’s closest advisers in the early days of the crisis before being named nuclear disaster minister. “As for before that, I myself am not sure. In the days before that, which were a matter of life and death for Japan as a nation, I wasn’t taking part in what was happening with Speedi.”

The computer forecasts were among many pieces of information the authorities initially withheld from the public.

Meltdowns at three of Fukushima Daiichi’s six reactors went officially unacknowledged for months. In one of the most damning admissions, nuclear regulators said in early June that inspectors had found tellurium 132, which experts call telltale evidence of reactor meltdowns, a day after the tsunami — but did not tell the public for nearly three months. For months after the disaster, the government flip-flopped on the level of radiation permissible on school grounds, causing continuing confusion and anguish about the safety of schoolchildren here in Fukushima.

Too Late

The timing of many admissions — coming around late May and early June, when inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency visited Japan and before Japan was scheduled to deliver a report on the accident at an I.A.E.A. conference — suggested to critics that Japan’s nuclear establishment was coming clean only because it could no longer hide the scope of the accident. On July 4, the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, a group of nuclear scholars and industry executives, said, “It is extremely regrettable that this sort of important information was not released to the public until three months after the fact, and only then in materials for a conference overseas.”

The group added that the authorities had yet to disclose information like the water level and temperature inside reactor pressure vessels that would yield a fuller picture of the damage. Other experts have said the government and Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as Tepco, have yet to reveal plant data that could shed light on whether the reactors’ cooling systems were actually knocked out solely by the 45-foot-tall tsunami, as officials have maintained, or whether damage from the earthquake also played a role, a finding that could raise doubts about the safety of other nuclear plants in a nation as seismically active as Japan.

Government officials insist that they did not knowingly imperil the public.

“As a principle, the government has never acted in such a way as to sacrifice the public’s health or safety,” said Mr. Hosono, the nuclear disaster minister.

Here in the prefecture’s capital and elsewhere, workers are removing the surface soil from schoolyards contaminated with radioactive particles from the nuclear plant. Tens of thousands of children are being kept inside school buildings this hot summer, where some wear masks even though the windows are kept shut. Many will soon be wearing individual dosimeters to track their exposure to radiation.

At Elementary School No. 4 here, sixth graders were recently playing shogi and go, traditional board games, inside. Nao Miyabashi, 11, whose family fled here from Namie, said she was afraid of radiation. She tried not to get caught in the rain. She gargled and washed her hands as soon as she got home.

“I want to play outside,” she said.

About 45 percent of 1,080 children in three Fukushima communities surveyed in late March tested positive for thyroid exposure to radiation, according to a recent announcement by the government, which added that the levels were too low to warrant further examination. Many experts both in and outside Japan are questioning the government’s assessment, pointing out that in Chernobyl, most of those who went on to suffer from thyroid cancer were children living near that plant at the time of the accident.

Critics inside and outside the Kan administration argue that some of the exposure could have been prevented if officials had released the data sooner.

On the evening of March 15, Mr. Kan called Mr. Soramoto, who used to design nuclear plants for Toshiba, to ask for his help in managing the escalating crisis. Mr. Soramoto formed an impromptu advisory group, which included his former professor at the University of Tokyo, Toshiso Kosako, a top Japanese expert on radiation measurement.

Mr. Kosako, who studied the Soviet response to the Chernobyl crisis, said he was stunned at how little the leaders in the prime minister’s office knew about the resources available to them. He quickly advised the chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, to use Speedi, which used measurements of radioactive releases, as well as weather and topographical data, to predict where radioactive materials could travel after being released into the atmosphere.

Speedi had been designed in the 1980s to make forecasts of radiation dispersal that, according to the prime minister’s office’s own nuclear disaster manuals, were supposed to be made available at least to local officials and rescue workers in order to guide evacuees away from radioactive plumes.

And indeed, Speedi had been churning out maps and other data hourly since the first hours after the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami. But the Education Ministry had not provided the data to the prime minister’s office because, it said, the information was incomplete. The tsunami had knocked out sensors at the plant: without measurements of how much radiation was actually being released by the plant, they said, it was impossible to measure how far the radioactive plume was stretching.

“Without knowing the strength of the releases, there was no way we could take responsibility if evacuations were ordered,” said Keiji Miyamoto of the Education Ministry’s nuclear safety division, which administers Speedi.

The government had initially resorted to drawing rings around the plant, evacuating everyone within a radius of first 1.9 miles, then 6.2 miles and then 12.4 miles, widening the rings as the scale of the disaster became clearer.

But even with incomplete data, Mr. Kosako said he urged the government to use Speedi by making educated guesses as to the levels of radiation release, which would have still yielded usable maps to guide evacuation plans. In fact, the ministry had done precisely that, running simulations on Speedi’s computers of radiation releases. Some of the maps clearly showed a plume of nuclear contamination extending to the northwest of the plant, beyond the areas that were initially evacuated.

However, Mr. Kosako said, the prime minister’s office refused to release the results even after it was made aware of Speedi, because officials there did not want to take responsibility for costly evacuations if their estimates were later called into question.

A wider evacuation zone would have meant uprooting hundreds of thousands of people and finding places for them to live in an already crowded country. Particularly in the early days after the earthquake, roads were blocked and trains were not running. These considerations made the government desperate to limit evacuations beyond the 80,000 people already moved from areas around the plant, as well as to avoid compensation payments to still more evacuees, according to current and former officials interviewed.

Mr. Kosako said the top advisers to the prime minister repeatedly ignored his frantic requests to make the Speedi maps public, and he resigned in April over fears that children were being exposed to dangerous radiation levels.

Some advisers to the prime minister argue that the system was not that useful in predicting the radiation plume’s direction. Shunsuke Kondo, who heads the Atomic Energy Commission, an advisory body in the Cabinet Office, said that the maps Speedi produced in the first days were inconsistent, and changed several times a day depending on wind direction.

“Why release something if it was not useful?” said Mr. Kondo, also a retired professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Tokyo. “Someone on the ground in Fukushima, looking at which way the wind was blowing, would have known just as much.”

Mr. Kosako and others, however, say the Speedi maps would have been extremely useful in the hands of someone who knew how to sort through the system’s reams of data. He said the Speedi readings were so complex, and some of the predictions of the spread of radiation contamination so alarming, that three separate government agencies — the Education Ministry and the two nuclear regulators, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency and Nuclear Safety Commission — passed the data to one another like a hot potato, with none of them wanting to accept responsibility for its results.

In interviews, officials at the ministry and the agency each pointed fingers, saying that the other agency was responsible for Speedi. The head of the commission declined to be interviewed.

Mr. Baba, the mayor of Namie, said that if the Speedi data had been made available sooner, townspeople would have naturally chosen to flee to safer areas. “But we didn’t have the information,” he said. “That’s frustrating.”

Evacuees now staying in temporary prefabricated homes in Nihonmatsu said that, believing they were safe in Tsushima, they took few precautions. Yoko Nozawa, 70, said that because of the lack of toilets, they resorted to pits in the ground, where doses of radiation were most likely higher.

“We were in the worst place, but didn’t know it,” Ms. Nozawa said. “Children were playing outside.”

A neighbor, Hiroyuki Oto, 31, said he was working at the plant for a Tepco subcontractor at the time of the earthquake and was now in temporary lodging with his wife and three young children, after also staying in Tsushima. “The effects might emerge only years from now,” he said of the exposure to radiation. “I’m worried about my kids.”

Seeds of Mistrust

Mr. Hosono, the minister charged with dealing with the nuclear crisis, has said that certain information, including the Speedi data, had been withheld for fear of “creating a panic.” In an interview, Mr. Hosono — who now holds nearly daily news conferences with Tepco officials and nuclear regulators — said that the government had “changed its thinking” and was trying to release information as fast as possible.

Critics, as well as the increasingly skeptical public, seem unconvinced. They compare the response to the Minamata case in the 1950s, a national scandal in which bureaucrats and industry officials colluded to protect economic growth by hiding the fact that a chemical factory was releasing mercury into Minamata Bay in western Japan. The mercury led to neurological illnesses in thousands of people living in the region and was captured in wrenching photographs of stricken victims.

“If they wanted to protect people, they had to release information immediately,” said Reiko Seki, a sociologist at Rikkyo University in Tokyo and an expert on the cover-up of the Minamata case. “Despite the experience with Minamata, they didn’t release Speedi.”

In Koriyama, a city about 40 miles west of the nuclear plant, a group of parents said they had stopped believing in government reassurances and recently did something unthinkable in a conservative, rural area: they sued. Though their suit seeks to force Koriyama to relocate their children to a safer area, their real aim is to challenge the nation’s handling of evacuations and the public health crisis.

After the nuclear disaster, the government raised the legal exposure limit to radiation from one to 20 millisieverts a year for people, including children — effectively allowing them to continue living in communities from which they would have been barred under the old standard. The limit was later scaled back to one millisievert per year, but applied only to children while they were inside school buildings.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Toshio Yanagihara, said the authorities were withholding information to deflect attention from the nuclear accident’s health consequences, which will become clear only years later.

“Because the effects don’t emerge immediately, they can claim later on that cigarettes or coffee caused the cancer,” he said.

The Japanese government is considering monitoring the long-term health of Fukushima residents and taking appropriate measures in the future, said Yasuhiro Sonoda, a lawmaker and parliamentary secretary of the Cabinet Office. The mayor of Koriyama, Masao Hara, said he did not believe that the government’s radiation standards were unsafe. He said it was “unrealistic” to evacuate the city’s 33,000 elementary and junior high school students.

But Koriyama went further than the government’s mandates, removing the surface soil from its schools before national directives and imposing tougher inspection standards than those set by the country’s education officials.

“The Japanese people, after all, have a high level of knowledge,” the mayor said, “so I think information should be disclosed correctly and quickly so that the people can make judgments, especially the people here in Fukushima.”

Norimitsu Onishi reported from Fukushima, and Martin Fackler from Tokyo. Ken Belson and Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting from Tokyo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011...?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Dennis, can you shorten the line of ------------------- in your last post a bit? It makes the page turn into horizontal scrolling and much harder to read. Thanks!

I now see the folly of my ways, Japans pro-nuke industry says Plutonium is so safe you can drink it. I was wrong to
ever question the nuke industry, They all have a Phd so everything they say is gospel.. /sarcasm
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday, August 8, 2011
Three Plutonium Brothers of Japan: "They Are So Safe You Can Drink It" (Updated with Transcript)

(UPDATE: Transcript at the bottom for those who'd rather read.)

The original Japanese video was compiled by "sievert311":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppon_vEJLCQ&feature=channel_video_title

"sievert311" also has a Dr. Shunichi "100 millisievert is safe" Yamashita's video in three languages (English, Spanish, French). Check it out.

=================================================

Tokyo Brown Tabby's latest captioning is over the collection of video clips of three Japanese nuclear researchers, claiming safety for plutonium on the national TV. The first two appeared on TV after the March 11 accident to assure the public that there was nothing to worry about on plutonium, because it was so safe.

Three Plutonium Brothers are:

(1)Tadashi Narabayashi
Professor in Engineering
at Hokkaido University
(in TV Asahi "Sunday Scramble" on Apr. 3, 2011)

(2)Keiichi Nakagawa
Associate Professor in Radiology
The University of Tokyo Hospital
(in Nippon TV "news every" on Mar. 29, 2011)

(3)Hirotada Ohashi
Professor in System Innovation
University of Tokyo
(at a panel discussion in Saga Pref. on Dec. 25, 2005, regarding using MOX fuel at Genkai Nuke Plant)


Transcript of the video. Spread the word, make them accountable:

Tadashi Narabayashi
Professor in Engineering
Hokkaido University
(in TV Asahi "Sunday Scramble" on Apr. 3, 2011)

Well, half of adult males will die if they ingest 200 grams of salt. With only 200 gram. However, oral lethal dose of plutonium-239 is 32g. So, if you　compare the toxicity, plutonium, when ingested, is not very different from salt. If you inhale it into your lungs, the lethal dose will be about 10　milligram. This is about the same as potassium cyanide. That sounds scary but the point is plutonium is no different from potassium cyanide. Some toxins like botulism bacillus that causes food
poisoning is much more dangerous. Dioxin is even more dangerous. So, unless you turn plutonium into powder and swallow it into your lungs....

MC: "No one would do that."

Besides, plutonium can be stopped by a single sheet of paper. Plutonium is made into nuclear fuels in facilities with good protective measures, so you don't need to worry.


Keiichi Nakagawa
Associate Professor in Radiology
University of Tokyo Hospital
(in Nippon TV "news every" on Mar. 29, 2011)

For example, plutonium will not be absorbed from the skin. Sometimes you ingest it through food, but in that case, most of it will go out in urine or stools. The problem occurs when you inhale it. Inhaling plutonium is said to increase the risk of lung cancer.

MC: "How will that affect our daily lives?"

Nothing.

MC: "Nothing?"

Nothing. To begin with, this material is very heavy. So, unlike iodine, it won't disperse in the air. Workers at the plant MAY be affected. So, I'd caution them to be careful. But I don't think the public should worry. For example, 50 years ago when I was born, the amount of plutonium was 1000 times higher than now.

MC: "Oh, why?"

Because of nuclear testing. So, even if the amount has now increased somewhat, in fact it's still much less than before. However, if it is released into the ocean through exhaust water, that's a problem. Once outside, plutonium hardly decreases.

MC: "It takes 24,000 years before it dicreases to half, doen't it?"

That's right. So, in that sense, plutonium is problematic. But then again, there will be no effect on the public. I think you can rest easy.

MC: "Let me summarize. Plutonium won't be absorbed from the skin. If it's ingested through food, it will go out of the body in urine. If it's inhaled, it may increase the risk of lung cancer. But since it's very heavy, we don't need to worry."


Hirotada Ohashi
Professor in System Innovation
University of Tokyo
(at a panel discussion in Saga Pref. on Dec. 25, 2005, regarding using
MOX fuel at Genkai Nuke Plant)

MC: Dr. Ohashi, please.

I'd like to point out two things. What happens in a [nuclear] accident depends entirely on your assumptions. If you assume everything would break and all the materials inside the reactor would be completely released into the environment, then we would get all kinds of result. But it's like discussing "what if a giant meteorite hit?" You are talking about the probability of an unlikely event.

You may think it's a big problem if an accident occurs at the reactor, but the nuclear experts do not think Containment Vessels will break. But the anti-nuclear people will say, "How do you know that?" Hydrogen explosions will not occur and I agree, but their argument is "how do you know that?"

So, right now in the safety review, we're assuming every technically possible situation. For example, such and such parts would break, plutonium would be released like this, then it would be stopped here...something like that. We set the hurdle high and still assume even the higher-level radiation would be released and make calculations.

This may be very difficult for you to understand this process, but we do. To figure out how far contamination might spread, we analyze based on our assumption of what could occur. However, the public interpret it as something that will occur. Or the anti-nuclear people take it in a wrong way and think we make such an assumption because it will happen. We can't have an argument with such people.

Another thing is the toxicity of plutonium. The toxicity of plutonium is very much exaggerated. Experts dealing with health damage by plutonium call this situation "social toxicity." In reality, there's nothing frightening about plutonium. If, in an extreme case, terrorists may take plutonium and throw it into a reservoir, which supplies the tap water. Then, will tens of thousands of people die? No, they won't. Not a single one will likely die. Plutonium is insoluble in water and will be
expelled quickly from the body even if it's ingested with water.

So, what Dr. Koide is saying is if we take plutonium particles one by one, cut open your lungs and bury the plutonium particles deep in the lungs, then that many people will die. A pure fantasy that would never happen.

He's basically saying we can't drive a car, we can't ride a train, because we don't know what will happen.

MC: "Thank you very much."

Pluto-kun (Little Plutonium Boy)
Mascot Character of Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (now Japan Atomic Energy Agency)

Let's imagine some bad guys have just thrown me into a reservoir. I'm not only hard to dissolve in water, but also hard to be absorbed from the stomach or intestines, and eventually I will be out of the body. So I can't actually kill people.

But it so often happens that bad guys take a small thing and turn it into a big lie to threaten people.

(caption)
See, we've been duped. Plutonium is not dangerous! We'd better ask these three to drink it up to prove it's not dangerous. Then we will feel safe, won't we? Please doctors, would you do it for us?
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/...s-of-japan-they.html

[This message has been edited by dennis_6 (edited 08-09-2011).]

Just out of curiosity, have any of you guys picked up stock in TEPCO since the earthquake?

quote Originally posted by 8-P: Just out of curiosity, have any of you guys picked up stock in TEPCO since the earthquake?

I think investing in the US dollar would be a sounder bet right now.

Do you think the steam is tritiated?

quote Originally posted by JazzMan: Here's a thought: TEPCO's been injecting millions of gallons of water into these reactors to cool the cores all these months. Where's the water going? Surely the reactors themselves aren't big enough to hold it all? Presumably some or most of it is vaporizing into (presumably irradiated and radioactive) steam, where's that steam going? For the reactors that seem to have water leaks, those millions of gallons of radioactive water are leaking out somewhere, but where is the water going? It's got to be going somewhere. I'm getting the impression that the amount of water by volume pumped into these reactors in the last five months has got to be an appreciable percentage of the volume of the entire facility. Follow the water (and steam), as they say... It seems to my plain ol' thoughts that where this contaminated stuff is going is sort of important to know...

quote Originally posted by dennis_6: Excessive radioactive cesium found in Fukushima fish: Greenpeace TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Fish caught at a port about 55 kilometers from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant contained radioactive cesium at levels exceeding an allowable limit, the environmental group Greenpeace said Tuesday. The samples taken at Onahama port in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, in late July, included a species of rockfish that measured 1,053 becquerels per kilogram. The reading, the highest among the samples, is well in excess of the government-set limit of 500 becquerels per kilogram, according to a study conducted by the environmental group. The other samples, which were all rock trout, measured between 625 and 749 becquerels per kilogram, again exceeding the provisional limit. The second such study of marine products was conducted over three days from July 22 in Iwaki and the town of Shinchi with cooperation of fishermen and those related to the fisheries industry in Fukushima. A total of 21 samples taken in the study were analyzed at a research institute in France, according to the group. "There is no allowable limit for internal exposure that can conclusively be said not to pose any problems," Greenpeace said in a petition submitted to Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Tuesday, noting the need to keep consumption of the food containing elevated levels of radioactive materials to a minimum. The petition also calls for tougher marine-product monitoring and for requiring businesses to display the level of radioactive materials contained in food products on the label. (Mainichi Japan) August 9, 2011 http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnn...2g00m0dm108000c.html

Seems to me the best solution to the cesium contamination is to raise the safety standards to something higher, like maybe 1,000,000 becquerels/kg, that way the problem with contamination in the food chain will go away. And, that solution is far, far easier and cheaper to implement than the other option of checking every fish that's caught anywhere within 100km of Japan for cesium radionuclides.

Japan's nuclear agency hides radiation results

North Asia correspondent Mark Willacy

Updated August 11, 2011 19:10:43

Health specialists say the commission fears a negative public reaction to children's exposure to radiation from the crippled Fukushima plant.


Japan's nuclear watchdog has denied public access to the results of thyroid check-ups for more than 1,000 Fukushima children exposed to radiation.

Critics have accused Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission of denying the public accurate information about the crisis.

The commission had earlier uploaded the test results of more than 1,000 children who were checked to see if radioactive substances were accumulating in their thyroids.

But it has been revealed that earlier this month the commission removed the data from its website, citing privacy reasons.

But health specialists have slammed the decision, saying the commission fears a negative public reaction to children's exposure to radiation from the crippled Fukushima plant.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/...5502/?site=melbourne

Nuclear safety: A dangerous veil of secrecy
Who can the public trust on nuclear safety - the anti-nuclear camp, the nuclear lobby or academics funded by the latter?
Dorothy Parvaz Last Modified: 11 Aug 2011 13:09
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Anti-nuclear rallies marking the attack on Hiroshima don't distinguish between nuclear energy and weapons [Reuters]

There are battles being fought on two fronts in the five months since a massive earthquake and tsunami damaged the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan.

On one front, there is the fight to repair the plant, operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and to contain the extent of contamination caused by the damage. On the other is the public’s fight to extract information from the Japanese government, TEPCO and nuclear experts worldwide.

The latter battle has yielded serious official humiliation, resulting high-profile resignations, scandals, and promises of reform in Japan’s energy industry whereas the latter has so far resulted in a storm of anger and mistrust.

Even most academic nuclear experts, seen by many as the middle ground between the anti-nuclear activists and nuclear lobby itself, were reluctant to say what was happening: That in Fukushima, a community of farms, schools and fishing ports, was experiencing a full-tilt meltdown, and that, as Al Jazeera reported in June, that the accident had most likely caused more radioactive contamination than Chernobyl.
Read more of our coverage of Japan's disasters

As recently as early August, those seeking information on the real extent of the damage at the Daiichi plant and on the extent of radioactive contamination have mostly been reassured by the nuclear community that there’s no need to worry.

This is worrying because while both anti-nuclear activists and the nuclear lobby both have openly stated biases, academics and researchers are seen as the middle ground - a place to get accurate, unbiased information.

David Biello, the energy and climate editor at Scientific American Online, said that trying to get clear information on a scenario such as the Daiichi disaster is tough.

“There's a lot of secrecy that can surround nuclear power because some of the same processes can be involved in generating electricity that can also be involved in developing a weapon, so there's a kind of a veil of secrecy that gets dropped over this stuff, that can also obscure the truth” said Biello.

"So, for example in Fukushima, it was pretty apparent that a total meltdown had occurred just based on what they were experiencing there ... but nobody in a position of authority was willing to say that."

A high-stakes game

There’s no denying that there’s a lot of money - and power - riding on the nuclear industry.

The money trail can be tough to follow - Westinghouse, Duke Energy and the Nuclear Energy Institute (a "policy organisation" for the nuclear industry with 350 companies, including TEPCO, on its roster) did not respond to requests for information on funding research and chairs at universities.

But most of the funding for nuclear research does not come directly from the nuclear lobby, said M.V. Ramana, a researcher at Princeton University specialising in the nuclear industry and climate change. Most research is funded by governments, who get donations - from the lobby (via candidates, political parties or otherwise).

The Center for Responsive Politics - a non-partisan, non-profit elections watchdog group – noted that even as many lobbying groups slowed their spending the first quarter of the year, the Nuclear industry "appears to be ratcheting up its lobbying" increasing its multi-million dollar spending.

"In the United States, a lot of the money doesn’t come directly from the nuclear industry, but actually comes from the Department of Energy (DOE). And the DOE has a very close relationship with the industry, and they sort of try to advance the industry’s interest," said Ramana. Indeed, nuclear engineering falls under the "Major Areas of Research" with the DOE, which also has nuclear weapons under its rubric.

The DOE's 2012 fiscal year budge request to the US Congress for nuclear energy programmes was $755m.

"So those people who get funding from that….it’s not like they (researchers) want to lie, but there’s a certain amount of, shall we say, ideological commitment to nuclear power, as well as a certain amount of self-censorship." It comes down to worrying how their next application for funding might be viewed, he said.

Kathleen Sullivan, an anti-nuclear specialist and disarmament education consultant with the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs, said it's not surprising that research critical of the nuclear energy and weapons isn't coming out of universities and departments that participate in nuclear research and development.
Naoto Kan, Japan's prime minister, vowed to challenge the "myth of safety" of nuclear power [Reuters]

"It (the influence) of the nuclear lobby could vary from institution to institution," said Sullivan. "If you look at the history of nuclear weapons manufacturing in the United States, you can see that a lot of research was influenced perverted, construed in a certain direction."

Sullivan points to the DOE-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California in Berkley (where some of the research for the first atomic bomb was done) as an example of how intertwined academia and government-funded nuclear science are.

The situation really isn’t much different in the field of nuclear energy, said Sullivan.

"It's all part and parcel to itself."

Of course this isn’t unique to the nuclear industry – all energy lobbies fund research one way or another. But the consequences of self-censorship when it comes to the potential downsides of nuclear energy are far more dire, than, say, for wind power.

"For nuclear physics to proceed, the only people interested in funding it are pro-nuclear folks, whether that be industry or government," said Biello. "So if you're involved in that area you've already got a bias in favour of that technology … if you study hammers, suddenly hammers seem to be the solution to everything."

And should they find results unfavourable to the industry, Ramana said they would "dress it up in various ways by saying 'Oh, there’s a very slim chance of this, and here are some safety measure we recommend,' and then the industry will say, 'Yeah,yeah, we’re incorporating all of that.'"

Ramana, for the record, said that while he's against nuclear weapons, he doesn't have a moral position on nuclear power except to say that as a cost-benefit issue, the costs outweigh the benefits, and that "in that sense, expanding nuclear power isn't a good idea."

But generally speaking, he said that nuclear researchers have a stake in reassuring the pubic that nothing bad is happening.

"'How is this going to affect the future of nuclear power?'That’s the first thought that came into their heads," said Ramana, adding, "They basically want to ensure that people will keep constructing nuclear power plants."

For instance, a May report by MIT’s Center For Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (where TEPCO funds a chair) points out that while the Daiichi disaster has resulted in "calls for cancellation of nuclear construction projects and reassessments of plant license extensions" which might "lead to a global slow-down of the nuclear enterprise," that "the lessons to be drawn from the Fukushima accident are different."

Among the report's closing thoughts are concerns that "Decision-making in the immediate aftermath of a major crisis is often influenced by emotion," and whether"an accident like Fukushima, which is so far beyond design basis, really warrant a major overhaul of current nuclear safety regulations and practises?"

"If so," wonder the authors, "When is safe safe enough? Where do we draw the line?"

The Japanese public, it seems, would like some answers to those very questions, albeit from a different perspective.

Kazuo Hizumi, a Tokyo-based human rights lawyer, is among those pushing for openness. He is also an editor at News for the People in Japan, a news site advocating for transparency from the government and from TEPCO.

With contradicting information and lack of clear coverage on safety and contamination issues, many have taken to measuring radiation levels with their own Geiger counters.

"They do not know how to do it," he said of some of the community groups and individuals who have taken to measure contamination levels in the air, soil and food.

"But mothers are worried about their children so much and Japanese government has to consider their worries."

A report released in July by Human Rights Now highlights the need for immediately accessible information on health and safety in areas where people have been affected by the disaster, including Fukushima, especially on the issues of contaminated food and evacuation plans.

A 'nuclear priesthood'

Biello describes the nuclear industry is a relatively small, exclusive club.

"The interplay between academia and also the military and industry is very tight. It's a small community...they have their little club and they can go about their business without anyone looking over their shoulder. "

This might explain how, as the Associated Press reported in June, that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was "working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nationalise ageing reactors operating within standards or simply failing to enforce them."

However, with this exclusivity comes a culture of secrecy – "a nuclear priesthood," said Biello, which makes it very difficult to parse out a straightforward answer in the very technical and highly politicised field.

"You have the proponents, who believe that it is the technological salvation for our problems, whether that's energy, poverty, climate change or whatever else. And then you have opponents who think that it's literally the worst thing that ever happened and should be immediately shut back up in a box and buried somewhere," said Biello, who includes "professors of nuclear engineering and Greenpeace activists" as passionate opponents on the nuclear subject.

In fact, one is hard pressed to find a media report quoting a nuclear scientist at any major university sounding the alarms on the risks of contamination in Fukushima.

Doing so has largely been the work of anti-nuclear activists (who have an admitted bias against the technology) and independent scientists employed by think tanks, few of whom responded to requests for interviews.

Even anthropologists who study the behaviour of those working in the nuclear power industry, refused to comment on the culture of secrecy that surrounds it.

The situation is much the same in Japan, said Hizumi, with "only a few who give people true information."

So, one's best bet, said Biello, is to try and "triangulate the truth" - to take "a dose" from anti-nuclear activists, another from pro-nuclear lobbyists and throw that in with a little bit of engineering and that'll get you closer to the truth.

"Take what everybody is saying with a grain of salt."

Nobody likes bad news

Since World War II, the process of secrecy – the readiness to invoke "national security" - has been a pillar of the nuclear establishment…that establishment, acting on the false assumption that "secrets" can be hidden from the curious and knowledgeable, has successfully insisted that there are answers which cannot be given and even questions which cannot be asked.

The net effect is to stifle debate about the fundamental of nuclear policy. Concerned citizens dare not ask certain questions, and many begin to feel that these matters which only a few initiated experts are entitled to discuss.

If the above sounds like a post-Fukushima statement, it is not. It was written by Howard Morland for the November 1979 issue of The Progressive magazine focusing on the hydrogen bomb as well as the risks of nuclear energy.

The US government - citing national security concerns - took the magazine to court in order to prevent the issue from being published, but ultimately relented during the appeals process when it became clear that the information The Progressive wanted to publish was already public knowledge and that pursuing the ban might put the court in the position of deeming the Atomic Energy Act as counter to First Amendment rights (freedom of speech) and therefore unconstitutional in its use of prior restraint to censor the press.
"Exciting Nuclear Land" is part of the Japanese school curriculum

But, of course, that's in the US, although a similar mechanism is at work in Japan, where a recently created task force aims to "cleanse" the media of reportage that casts an unfavourable light on the nuclear industry (they refer to this information as "inaccurate" or a result of "mischief."

The government has even go so far as to accept bids from companies that specialise in scouring the Internet to monitor the Internet for reports, Tweets and blogs that are critical of its handling of the Daiichi disaster, which has presented a unique challenge to the lobby there.

Hizumi said that the move to police online content on the disaster has upset the Japanese pubic and that the president of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations has openly criticised the policy.

"The public fully trusted the Japanese Government," said Hizumi. But the absence of "true information" has massively diminished that trust, as, he said, has the public's faith that TEPCO would be open about the potential dangers of a nuclear accident.

But Japan's government has a history of slow response to TEPCO's cover-ups. In 1989, that Kei Sugaoka, a nuclear energy at General Electric who inspected and repaired plants in Japan and elsewhere, said he spotted cracks in steam dryers and a "misplacement" or 180 degrees in one dryer unit. He noticed that the position of the dryer was later omitted from the inspection record's data sheet.

Sugaoka told a Japanese networkthat TEPCO had instructed him to "erase" the flaws, but he ultimately wrote a whistleblowing letter to METI, which resulted in the temporary 17 TEPCO reactors, including ones at the plant in Fukushima.

"I guess, just, you know, they're not being open to the public. They should be more open to the public," said Sugaoka.

"Everything is always kept a secret."

But the Japanese nuclear lobby has been quite active in shaping how people see nuclear energy. The country's Ministry of Education, together with the Natural Resources Ministry (of of two agencies under Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry - METI - overseeing nuclear policies) even provides schools with a nuclear energy information curriculum.

These worksheets - or education supplements - are used to inform children about the benefits of nuclear energy over fossil fuels.

Fukushima = Chernobyl?

Depending on who you believe, either Fukushima is another Chernobyl – in terms of the severity of the accident and risks of contamination – or it’s nothing like the 1986 disaster.

There’s reason to believe that at least in one respect, Fukushima can’t and won’t be another Chernobyl, at least due to the fact that the former has occurred in the age of the Internet whereas the latter took place in the considerably quaint 80s, when a car phone the size of a brick was considered the height of communications technology to most.

"It (a successful cover up) is definitely a danger in terms of Fukushima, and we'll see what happens. All you have to do is look at the first couple of weeks after Chernobyl to see the kind of cover up," said Biello.

"I mean the Soviet Union didn't even admit that anything was happening for a while, even though everybody was noticing these radiation spikes and all these other problems. The Soviet Union was not admitting that they were experiencing this catastrophic nuclear failure... in Japan, there's a consistent desire, or kind of a habit, of downplaying these accidents, when they happen. It's not as bad as it may seem, we haven't had a full meltdown."

Fast forward to 2011, when video clips of each puff of smoke out of the Daiichi plant make it around the world in seconds, news updates are available around the clock, activists post radiation readings on maps in multiple languages and Google Translate picks up the slack in translating every last Tweet on the subject coming out of Japan.

In short, it will be a heck of a lot harder to keep a lid on things than it was 25 years ago.

Follow D. Parvaz on Twitter: @DParvaz

http://english.aljazeera.ne...011877118599802.html

This is the 5th month anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that so horrendously damaged Japan. Five months, probably seems like an eternity to the survivors as they struggle to rebuild and come to terms with the deaths of family and friends. Life goes on and people survive, as they always have, making plans, cleaning away the broken and shattered remnants of their old life and begin anew, building a new hope and new homes and businesses.

In five months much progress has been made, except in the evacuation zone, hundreds of square miles, around the melted and crippled reactors in Fukushima. There, life is at a standstill, as it has since the original natural catastrophe struck Japan and triggered a man-made disaster that has no end in sight. Hundreds of thousands of people are refugees, not from the earthquake and tsunami, but from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, their lives on hold, with no real ability to plan on returning to their homes, their farms, their businesses, to rebuild and start anew.

Many of these refugee's homes were untouched by the tsunami, and only moderately damaged by the earthquake, but their farms and lands are as dead as if the tsunami had wiped everything off their lands. Nobody knows how long it will be before these victims of man's hubris will be allow to return to restart their lives. Many are elderly and expect to die as refugees.

The earthquake and tsunami only destroyed for a few hours, but the nuclear power plants are destroying for months, and likely years, and for many survivors, destroying for a lifetime. The costs of remediation and compensation for the reactors will be a burden on the Japanese economy for decades, if not centuries, taking its toll in a never-ending fashion.

I hope there is no truth in this blog....
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Breaking News: A citizen of Minami soma shi turned out to have had severe internal exposure
Posted by Mochizuki on August 11th, 2011

8/3/2011,on the TV show “News Watch 9″ of NHK,they report that people from Minami soma shi had whole body counter check.

On the TV show,camera caught one of the result sheets.

It reads,

Cs-137 129,746 Bq + Cs-134 122,676 Bq = 252,422 Bq/kg

The person has had a severe internal exposure.

Minami soma shi is south to Fukushima nuclear plant,about 30km area.


3/12,SPEEDI forecast plumes would fly to there,which was concealed by the government.
http://fukushima-diary.com/...e-internal-exposure/

[This message has been edited by dennis_6 (edited 08-11-2011).]

Japan Nuclear Plant Operator Expects to Miss Decon Goal
Friday, Aug. 12, 2011

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Tokyo Electric Power on Wednesday indicated it had little chance of meeting its goal to this year eliminate the bulk of radiation-tainted water flooding Japan's Fukushima Daiichi atomic power plant, the Asahi Shimbun reported (see GSN, Aug. 11).

The company has battled to prevent radioactive contaminants from escaping the six-reactor facility following a March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left more than 20,000 people dead or missing in Japan. The firm has pumped water into the plant on an ongoing basis in an effort to cool components, resulting in radiation-tainted liquid pooling in large portions of the site.

A decontamination system activated in June is intended to cleanse tainted fluid for reuse in the temperature control efforts, but the equipment's performance has fallen short of maximum designed efficiency.

The apparatus operated at 66.4 percent efficiency over a weeklong period that concluded on Tuesday, the company said. The system's efficiency dropped 7.6 percent from the prior week.

The plant contained 120,240 tons of radioactive liquid, the firm indicated (see GSN, Aug. 5; Asahi Shimbun I, Aug. 12).

Tokyo Electric Power on Wednesday launched the circulation heat mitigation mechanism for the No. 1 reactor's spent fuel cooling pond, the last pool at a damaged part of the plant to lack such equipment, Japan Broadcasting reported (Japan Broadcasting, Aug. 10).

Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan and top Cabinet Office officials on Friday endorsed a proposal to establish a new nuclear accident prevention entity within the country's Environment Ministry, Kyodo News reported (Kyodo News/Mainichi Daily News, Aug. 12).

Elsewhere, 584 schools and other sites where children congregate in Japan's Fukushima prefecture have planned for the removal of radiation-tainted earth from their grounds, the Asahi Shimbun reported. Ninety-seven percent of the centers are slated to complete the effort ahead of the fall school term (Asahi Shimbun II, Aug. 12).
http://www.globalsecurityne...nw_20110812_8634.php

Radiation effect on children's thyroid glands

A survey shows that a small amount of radioactive iodine has been detected in the thyroid glands of hundreds of children in Fukushima Prefecture.

The result was reported to a meeting of the Japan Pediatric Society in Tokyo on Saturday.

A group of researchers led by Hiroshima University professor Satoshi Tashiro tested 1,149 children in the prefecture for radiation in their thyroid glands in March following the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Radioactive iodine was detected in about half of the children.

Tashiro says radiation in thyroid glands exceeding 100 millisieverts poses a threat to humans, but that the highest level in the survey was 35 millisieverts.

Tashiro says based on the result, it is unlikely that thyroid cancer will increase in the future, but that health checks must continue to prepare for any eventuality.

Sunday, August 14, 2011 02:16 +0900 (JST)
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/13_26.html

8/16/2011 @ 2:55PM |24,620 views
Where's That Radioactive Sulfur Now? Possibly In Your Pants
When the news broke yesterday that a previously unreported type of fallout from Fukushima—radioactive sulfur—had reached the United States in late March, nearly all mainstream media reports made the claim that it poses no threat to the health of Americans. But none of them explained where the radioactive sulfur went.

And if you’re a man, you may be interested to know that some miniscule portion of it could be in your testicles.
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Scientists from the University of California San Diego have routinely monitored natural levels of radioactive sulfur in the atmosphere in La Jolla, California, since 2009. Radioactive sulfur is produced naturally in the stratosphere when gamma rays strike argon atoms, but very little of that radioactive sulfur reaches the lower atmosphere.

On March 28, the researchers recorded a spike in radioactive sulfur that they doubted could have come from the stratosphere:

On a normal day, (Antra) Priyadarshi sees between 180 and 475 sulfur-35 atoms as sulfates per cubic meter of air, but on the 28th, her team recorded about 1500. “No one has ever seen such a high percentage of the stratospheric air coming into the marine-bound layer,” she says.

via Fukushima Reactor Damage Picked Up in California Winds – ScienceNOW.

The researchers surmise the sulfur was produced when emergency workers at Fukushima flooded the nuclear plant’s runaway reactors with seawater to cool the melting fuel rods. Neutrons emitted by the fuel rods struck chlorine atoms in the water, forming sulfur-35 that escaped from the plant in the form of steam.

Prevailing winds carried the sulfur toward California, the researchers contend. They estimate that only about 0.7 percent of the radioactive sulfur emitted at Fukushima reached the California coast.

The California Air Resources Board estimates that Californians inhale 10-50 liters of air per minute during normal activities ranging from sitting to running. A liter equals 0.001 cubic meters, meaning Californians may have inhaled only about 360 radioactive sulfur atoms on that day—or more.

Priyadarshi’s co-author, Mark Thiemens, assured The Los Angeles Times that the levels observed pose no threat to Californians. ”The levels we observed are in no way harmful in California,” Thiemens said.

Many scientists agree such tiny amounts of radiation pose no risk—except for those scientists who contend that all additional radiation poses additional risk.

Sulfur-35 is a weak beta emitter. All but 20 percent of the radiation it emits is halted by the dead layer of skin at the surface of the human body, according to the Health Physics Society. However, the body more readily absorbs ingested or inhaled sulfur.

Sulfur-35 has a half-life of 87.5 days outside of the body, but a biological half-life of 623 days, according to Michigan State University’s Office of Radiation, Chemical & Biological Safety.

Most universities advise employees to handle volatile Sulfur-35 within a hooded enclosure.

Sulfur-35 is absorbed by the entire body but is of particular concern to men because it tends to concentrate in the testicles, according to a Nuclide Safety Data Sheet from the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Beta radiation occurring there could damage neighboring cells.

The San Diego researchers published their findings Monday in the Publication of the National Academy of Sciences. Their report does not address the heath effects of radioactive sulfur, which they do not consider significant in this event, but it seeks to use the La Jolla data to derive the intensity of neutron radiation at Fukushima.

Scientists including Andreas Stohl of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research and Edward Morse of UC Berkeley questioned the reliability of those conclusions, according to published reports.
http://www.forbes.com/sites...sibly-in-your-pants/

Wednesday, August 17, 2011
US Government Considered Evacuation of 90,000 US Citizens in Tokyo

According to Kevin Maher, a US diplomat and the former director of the Japan Desk at the US State Department in Japan, the US government considered evacuating all 90,000 US citizens in Tokyo right after the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident.

From Yomiuri Shinbun (10:30PM JST 8/17/2011):

東京電力福島第一原子力発電所の事故直後、米政府が、東京在住の米国人９万人全員を避難させる案を検討していたことが分かった。

The US government was considering the plan to evacuate all 90,000 US citizens living in Tokyo right after the Fukushima I Nuclear power Plant accident, according to a new book.

元米国務省日本部長のケビン・メア氏が、１９日に出版する「決断できない日本」（文春新書）で明らかにした。９万人避難が実行されていれば、他国の政府対応はもとより、日本人にもパ� ��ックを引き起こしかねないところだった。

The book, which is to be published on August 17, is titled "決断できない日本 (Japan that cannot decide)" (Bunshun Shinsho) and was written by Kevin Maher, former Japan Desk director at the US State Department. If the plan to evacuate 90,000 Americans had been carried out, it could have triggered reactions from other foreign governments, and caused panic among the Japanese.

　メア氏は震災直後、国務省内の特別作業班で日本側との調整にあたり、著書にその内幕をつづった。

Maher's book recounts the inside information that Maher obtained as he was part of the special task force within the State Department right after the March 11 disaster, communicating with the Japanese side.

　米国人の避難が提起されたのは、３月１６日未明（現地時間）の会議だった。米側は無人偵察機グローバルホークの情報から原子炉の温度が異常に高いことを把握し、「燃料が既に溶融し� ��いる」と判断。菅政権が対応を東電任せにしているとみて、「不信感は強烈」な状況だったという。米国人の避難を求めた政府高官に対し、メア氏らは「日米同盟が大きく揺らぐ事態にな� �」と反論し、実行に移さなかったとしている。

The subject of evacuating the US citizens was raised in the early hours on March 16 (local time). The US had already knew about the unusually high temperature of the reactors from the Global Hawk data, and determined that "the fuel has already melted". The US thought the Kan administration was simply leaving the disaster response to TEPCO, and "distrust [in the administration] was intense". The US high-ranking officials wanted to evacuate the US citizens [from Tokyo] but the local officials including Maher objected, as "it would severely undermine the US-Japan alliance". The plan was never implemented.

It's very heart-warming to know they left 90,000 US citizens in Tokyo under the radioactive plume, which literally rained on them on March 15, 16 and 21, for the sake of "alliance", isn't it?

I also remember back in March that the US investment bank Goldman Sachs flew in high-ranking executives to Tokyo, and told the US employees there in no uncertain terms that they were to stay put in Tokyo, or they would lose their jobs.
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/...d-evacuation-of.html