Just some headlines, no doubt phonedawgz will find a way to twist them. What amazes me is why anyone is listening to him over people with Phds, all the media that is reporting, etc. You don't have to like me, you don't have to trust me. Do your own research.

Gov’t: Radioactive strontium detected at 2 more locations in Yokohama, 250km from meltdowns — Approaching levels of most contaminated area in Fukushima
http://enenews.com/govt-rad...kushima-test-results

New Radiation Results from Elementary Schools: Nagano around 20 times normal at 1.7µSv/hr, 270 km from meltdowns — Tokyo’s Kita Ward at 1 µSv/hr
http://enenews.com/new-resu...ost-300-km-meltdowns

WSJ: Tokyo-area officials say park has radiation levels 5 times higher than previously detected in city
http://enenews.com/wsj-toky...sly-detected-in-city

Where are the bottles? Video of radiation at 5.82 µSv/hr near Tokyo in Funabashi
http://enenews.com/bottles-...svhr-tokyo-funabashi

Bloomberg: Single Tokyo ward has 13 schools with radiation levels above safety standard
http://enenews.com/bloomber...bove-safety-standard

Guardian: “Danger Reading” in Tokyo — Radiation near level that triggers an evacuation — 17 times recommended limit — More contaminated than areas in exclusion zone
http://enenews.com/guardian...areas-exclusion-zone

Real news:

"IAEA urges pragmatic clean-up
14 October 2011
An international expert mission has advised the Japanese government to avoid "over-conservatism" in its efforts to remediate large areas of contaminated land around the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The 12-member team was assembled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the request of the Japanese government to help them develop remediation strategies for land contaminated as a result of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in March. The team reviewed remediation-related strategies, plans and works, including contamination mapping, currently undertaken by Japanese authorities.

The team returned from Japan today and has now published its preliminary findings and presented them to the Japanese government.

The mission focused on the remediation of the affected areas outside of the 20 kilometre restricted area. The team said that it agrees with the prioritization and the general strategy being implemented, and suggests that further missions could be sent to confirm the progress being made and to address the remediation challenges actually within the zone.

The Japanese government has defined a set of reference levels to control the exposure of the public. In areas where the annual effective dose is estimated to be above 20 millisieverts (mSv), the government aims to reduce the estimated annual dose to less than that amount. In areas where an estimated annual exposure dose is less then 20 mSv, the government plans to conduct effective remediation work so that the estimated annual exposure dose will be less then 1 mSv.

Specific attention is being given to the exposure of children. Therefore, current efforts focus on measures to reduce children's exposures in schools and kindergartens to an effective dose of 1 mSv per year during the time they attending or travelling to school.

The expert team said that Japan's approach of using demonstration sites to assess various remediation methods "is a very helpful way to support the decision-making process."

However, Japanese authorities were encouraged to "cautiously balance the different factors that influence the net benefit of the remediation measures to ensure dose reduction." They should "avoid over-conservatism" which "could not effectively contribute to the reduction of exposure doses."

The major strategy being considered by Japanese authorities for decontaminating affected areas is the removal of up to 5 cm of top soil. However, the mission team notes that, although this would significantly reduce radionuclide concentrations in the upper layer of soils, it would generate "unnecessarily huge amounts of residual materials."

The preliminary estimate of the volume of contaminated material that could come from clean-up is between 5 and 29 million cubic metres. This is in addition to some 2.3 million tonnes of contaminated debris that has already been collected.

The mission's preliminary report noted that it is "important to avoid classifying as 'radioactive waste' such waste materials that do not cause exposures that would warrant special radiation protection measures." The team suggests that authorities establish "realistic and credible limits" regarding associated exposures. Slightly contaminated material, it says, could be used in various ways, such as the construction of reclamations, banks and roads.

The team also warned the Japanese government of the "potential risk of misunderstandings that could arise if the population is only or mainly concerned with contamination concentrations rather than dose levels." It added, "The investment of time and effort in removing contamination concentrations from everywhere, such as all forest areas and areas where the additional exposure is relatively low, does not automatically lead to reduction of doses for the public." The team's report calls on the Japanese authorities to "maintain their focus on remediation activities that bring best results in reducing the doses to the public."

The final report of the mission will be submitted to the Japanese government by 15 November"

http://www.world-nuclear-ne...efforts-1410115.html

Is this more alarmist wacko news? Hint, before you call BS its the NEW YORK TIMES

Toshiyuki Hattori, who runs a sewage plant in Tokyo, surrounded by sacks of radioactive sludge.
By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: October 14, 2011


TOKYO — Takeo Hayashida signed on with a citizens’ group to test for radiation near his son’s baseball field in Tokyo after government officials told him they had no plans to check for fallout from the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Like Japan’s central government, local officials said there was nothing to fear in the capital, 160 miles from the disaster zone.
A baseball stadium in Tokyo was found to be contaminated with radioactive cesium. There have been calls for broader testing.

Then came the test result: the level of radioactive cesium in a patch of dirt just yards from where his 11-year-old son, Koshiro, played baseball was equal to those in some contaminated areas around Chernobyl.

The patch of ground was one of more than 20 spots in and around the nation’s capital that the citizens’ group, and the respected nuclear research center they worked with, found were contaminated with potentially harmful levels of radioactive cesium.

It has been clear since the early days of the nuclear accident, the world’s second worst after Chernobyl, that that the vagaries of wind and rain had scattered worrisome amounts of radioactive materials in unexpected patterns far outside the evacuation zone 12 miles around the stricken plant. But reports that substantial amounts of cesium had accumulated as far away as Tokyo have raised new concerns about how far the contamination had spread, possibly settling in areas where the government has not even considered looking.

The government’s failure to act quickly, a growing chorus of scientists say, may be exposing many more people than originally believed to potentially harmful radiation. It is also part of a pattern: Japan’s leaders have continually insisted that the fallout from Fukushima will not spread far, or pose a health threat to residents, or contaminate the food chain. And officials have repeatedly been proved wrong by independent experts and citizens’ groups that conduct testing on their own.

“Radioactive substances are entering people’s bodies from the air, from the food. It’s everywhere,” said Kiyoshi Toda, a radiation expert at Nagasaki University’s faculty of environmental studies and a medical doctor. “But the government doesn’t even try to inform the public how much radiation they’re exposed to.”

The reports of hot spots do not indicate how widespread contamination is in the capital; more sampling would be needed to determine that. But they raise the prospect that people living near concentrated amounts of cesium are being exposed to levels of radiation above accepted international standards meant to protect people from cancer and other illnesses.

Japanese nuclear experts and activists have begun agitating for more comprehensive testing in Tokyo and elsewhere, and a cleanup if necessary. Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert and a former special assistant to the United States secretary of energy, echoed those calls, saying the citizens’ groups’ measurements “raise major and unprecedented concerns about the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.”

The government has not ignored citizens’ pleas entirely; it recently completed aerial testing in eastern Japan, including Tokyo. But several experts and activists say the tests are unlikely to be sensitive enough to be useful in finding micro hot spots such as those found by the citizens’ group.

Kaoru Noguchi, head of Tokyo’s health and safety section, however, argues that the testing already done is sufficient. Because Tokyo is so developed, she says, radioactive material was much more likely to have fallen on concrete, then washed away. She also said exposure was likely to be limited.

“Nobody stands in one spot all day,” she said. “And nobody eats dirt.”

Tokyo residents knew soon after the March 11 accident, when a tsunami knocked out the crucial cooling systems at the Fukushima plant, that they were being exposed to radioactive materials. Researchers detected a spike in radiation levels on March 15. Then as rain drizzled down on the evening of March 21, radioactive material again fell on the city.

In the following week, however, radioactivity in the air and water dropped rapidly. Most in the city put aside their jitters, some openly scornful of those — mostly foreigners — who had fled Tokyo in the early days of the disaster.

But not everyone was convinced. Some Tokyo residents bought dosimeters. The Tokyo citizens’ group, the Radiation Defense Project, which grew out of a Facebook discussion page, decided to be more proactive. In consultation with the Yokohama-based Isotope Research Institute, members collected soil samples from near their own homes and submitted them for testing.

Some of the results were shocking: the sample that Mr. Hayashida collected under shrubs near his neighborhood baseball field in the Edogawa ward measured nearly 138,000 becquerels per square meter of radioactive cesium 137, which can damage cells and lead to an increased risk of cancer.

Of the 132 areas tested, 22 were above 37,000 becquerels per square meter, the level at which zones were considered contaminated at Chernobyl.

Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, said most residents near Chernobyl were undoubtedly much worse off, surrounded by widespread contamination rather than isolated hot spots. But he said the 37,000 figure remained a good reference point for mandatory cleanup because regular exposure to such contamination could result in a dosage of more than one millisievert per year, the maximum recommended for the public by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.

The most contaminated spot in the Radiation Defense survey, near a church, was well above the level of the 1.5 million becquerels per square meter that required mandatory resettlement at Chernobyl. The level is so much higher than other results in the study that it raises the possibility of testing error, but micro hot spots are not unheard of after nuclear disasters.

Japan’s relatively tame mainstream media, which is more likely to report on government pronouncements than grass-roots movements, mainly ignored the citizens’ group’s findings.

“Everybody just wants to believe that this is Fukushima’s problem,” said Kota Kinoshita, one of the group’s leaders and a former television journalist. “But if the government is not serious about finding out, how can we trust them?”

Hideo Yamazaki, an expert in environmental analysis at Kinki University in western Japan, did his own survey of the city and said he, too, discovered high levels in the area where the baseball field is located.

“These results are highly localized, so there is no cause for panic,” he said. “Still, there are steps the government could be taking, like decontaminating the highest spots.”

Since then, there have been other suggestions that hot spots were more widespread than originally imagined.

Last month, a local government in a Tokyo ward found a pile of composted leaves at a school that measured 849 becquerels per kilogram of cesium 137, over two times Japan’s legally permissible level for compost.

And on Wednesday, civilians who tested the roof of an apartment building in the nearby city of Yokohama — farther from Fukushima than Tokyo — found high quantities of radioactive strontium. (There was also one false alarm this week when sky-high readings were reported in the Setagaya ward in Tokyo; the government later said they were probably caused by bottles of radium, once widely used to make paint.)

The government’s own aerial testing showed that although almost all of Tokyo had relatively little contamination, two areas showed elevated readings. One was in a mountainous area at the western edge of the Tokyo metropolitan region, and the other was over three wards of the city — including the one where the baseball field is situated.

The metropolitan government said it had started preparations to begin monitoring food products from the nearby mountains, but acknowledged that food had been shipped from that area for months.

Mr. Hayashida, who discovered the high level at the baseball field, said that he was not waiting any longer for government assurances. He moved his family to Okayama, about 370 miles to the southwest.

“Perhaps we could have stayed in Tokyo with no problems,” he said. “But I choose a future with no radiation fears.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011...20hot%20spots&st=cse

[This message has been edited by dennis_6 (edited 10-15-2011).]

quote Originally posted by dennis_6: Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert and a former special assistant to the United States secretary of energy, echoed those calls, saying the citizens’ groups’ measurements “raise major and unprecedented concerns about the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.”

Just wondering if Robert Alvarez is a liberal, alarmist, wacko, that clearly doesn't know what he is talking about?

quote Originally posted by carnut122: I'm glad it appears the government is reacting to the situation and has apparently started the clean-up. However, I have to wonder if they are thinking "why begin the clean-up when the 'fallout' is still continuing?" per some sources . And, possibly thinking, "until the reactors are properly under control, cleaning up now will only result in re-doing the same work later." It's probably a no-win situation. I have to agree that they need to prioritize clean-up based on exposure/risk factors.

So why is the Japanese government cleaning this up? I though it was TEPCO's mess and therefor TEPCO's responsibility? I don't think the Japanese taxpayer agreed to pay for cleaning up this mess created by a private corporation.