Fukushima One Year Later: 1. Still Ain't Over 2. Only Getting Worse..

The Dangerous Myths of Fukushima  Counterpunch.  Excerpts:


The myth that Fukushima radiation levels were too low to harm humans persists, a year after the meltdown. A March 2, 2012 New York Times article quoted Vanderbilt University professor John Boice: “there’s no opportunity for conducting epidemiological studies that have any chance for success – the doses are just too low.” Wolfgang Weiss of the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation also recently said doses observed in screening of Japanese people “are very low.”



Views like these are political, not scientific, virtually identical to what the nuclear industry cheerleaders claim.
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But just one year after Fukushima, the “no harm” mantra is now being crowded by evidence – evidence to the contrary.



First, estimates of releases have soared. The first reports issued by the Japanese government stated that emissions equaled 10% of 1986 Chernobyl emissions. A few weeks later, they doubled that estimate to 20%. By October 2011, an article in the journal Nature estimated Fukushima emissions to be more than double that of Chernobyl.
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Where did the radioactive particles and gases go? Officials from national meteorological agencies in countries like France and Austria followed the plume, and made colorful maps available on the Internet. Within six days of the meltdowns, the plume had reached the U.S., and within 18 days, it had circled the Northern Hemisphere.



How much radiation entered the U.S. environment? A July 2011 journal article by officials at Pacific Northwest National Lab in eastern Washington State measured airborne radioactive Xenon-133 up to 40,000 times greater than normal in the weeks following the fallout. Xenon-133 is a gas that travels rapidly and does not enter the body, but signals that other, more dangerous types of radioactive chemicals will follow.
A February 2012 journal article by the U.S. Geological Survey looked at radioactive Iodine-131 that entered soil from rainfall, and found levels hundreds of times above normal in places like Portland OR, Fresno CA, and Denver CO. The same places also had the highest levels of Cesium-134 and Cesium-137 in the U.S. While elevated radiation levels were found in all parts of the country, it appears that the West Coast and Rocky Mountain states received the greatest amounts of Fukushima fallout.


L.A. Times: Speculation that “supercritical fission event” occurred at Fukushima reactor irradiating plutonium, says nuclear expert — Explosion so massive investigators found fuel rod fragments a mile away  ENews.  Excerpts:


Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy adviser in the U.S. Energy Department
"They were irradiating plutonium in Unit 3, which experienced the biggest explosion"



The explosion was so massive that investigators found fuel rod fragments a mile away, leading to speculation that a supercritical fission event may have also occurred.


Much remains unknown one year after the disaster.


Authorities can't say exactly where breaches occurred in the reactor vessels and spent fuel pools that caused contaminated water to flood the plant's lower levels.


The last two excerpts within the article might be misinformation..  The commentors in the following section seem to think so!  Plutonium 241 release at 1/10,000 of Chernobyl?  Uh-huh..  Uh-huh.. 


"Planetary Genocide": Fukushima One Year Later : The Poisoning of Planet Earth  Global Research via Before It's News.  Excerpts:


Early on, even essential radioactive monitoring was shut down. In May 2011, the prestigious Norsk Institute’s online site was blocked from the US. They had been monitoring on a daily basis the worldwide radioactive contamination to which we were all –and continue to be– exposed. Conveniently, any early radiation monitoring in the US was inconsistent, with numerous sites supposedly not working for one or another reason. Then the so-called “acceptable” radiation levels in food were raised in the US and EU:

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So, what is not monitored, or where the radiation rates are manipulated, then no one –government officials and corporations– can ever be held accountable, nor can increased death rates, diabetes, stillbirths, birth defects ever be attributed to this catastrophic planetary event.



When have we ever been told the truth about our life-long systemic radiation poisoning? For decades, we have been uninformed experimental laboratory rats since before the Manhattan Project. There never were any ethical or precautionary considerations. Greed and secret agendas trumped everything else.


With various half-lives –some eons-long– of numerous radioactive components, the human race and every other living creature on our planet is on its way to extinction, due to the known sterilization effects of radiation. Here is a short list of the half-life of five of the radioactive isotopes that are and will continue to poison all of our children, and us, ad infinitum, in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink and in which we bathe:
Cesium 137: 30 years
Plutonium 239: 24,000 years
Strontium 90: 29 years [mimics calcium in the body]
Uranium 235: 700-million years
Iodine 131: 8 days [absorbed into the thyroid and gives heavy radiation dose. Also goes into the soil, passed onto us through cow’s milk.]
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Any reasonable safety precautions or realistic evacuations never took place at Fukushima or elsewhere. In addition, a collection of 40-years worth of 600,000 spent fuel rods posed an immediate HazMat threat that never went away. The water poured over them evaporated into radioactive steam to go directly into our planet’s atmosphere and the tons of sea water sprayed on the entire nuclear conflagration were criminally dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Again, because it was not monitored, we will never know how many millions of tons of radioactive water were dumped into the Pacific Ocean. The entire web of ocean life then was irreversibly contaminated with radioactive nuclear waste and detritus, as the ocean currents carried this nightmare to the west coast shores of North America (California, Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver).
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While hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions?) will develop various radiation-related illnesses (cancers and diabetes, as well as radiation-induced miscarriages, stillbirths and birth deformities) over the next decades, the coffers of the medical profession, pharmaceutical companies, and nuclear industry will be bursting with profits. The 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl continues its deathly impact –and that was only one reactor.(2) Fukushima had six reactors.



Most Important Video of the Year? Asahi TV: “Unbelievable” — If Unit 4 pool gets a crack from quake and leaks, it would be end for Tokyo -Expert — Doesn’t have to be large tremor, already shaken many times  You don't really need to watch the video or even read the excerpts from ENews.  Just re-read the previous three sentences.


All of Western US and most of East Coast, Midwest, Canada covered with airborne particles at various altitudes on March 20, Fukushima plume model shows — Based solely on Reactor No. 1 explosion (PHOTO)




Look at the plume simulations for March 20th.  March 22nd was the first day I can remember a Metallic taste to the air.  I was jogging, and in SW Missouri, it was drizzling.  I knew, just knew my imagination was getting the best of me.  Again, I second guessed my intuition.  I guess it really doesn't matter now, does it?  The damage continues to be done, and it continues to be Too Late.  Happy Anniversary, everyone!

Japan Quake: Latest Updates, March 17, 2011

Scientists Project Path of Radiation Plume

A United Nations forecast of the possible movement of the radioactive plume coming from crippled Japanese reactors shows it churning across the Pacific, and touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late Friday.

Health and nuclear experts emphasize that radiation in the plume will be diluted as it travels and, at worst, would have extremely minor health consequences in the United States, even if hints of it are ultimately detectable. In a similar way, radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 spread around the globe and reached the West Coast of the United States in 10 days, its levels measurable but minuscule.

The projection, by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, an arm of the United Nations in Vienna, gives no information about actual radiation levels but only shows how a radioactive plume would probably move and disperse.

It's comforting the U.N. can tell us levels will be "measurable but minuscule," hours, days, weeks, or months before this event's conclusion.  More information, less placation would be appreciated.

U.S. radiation experts try to decipher reports from Japan  Note:  This is a perfect example of a "Privatized Response" to a "Potentially Catastrophic" Event.  The myth that all corporations (Or really ANY) can handle disaster response better than a government response Has Got To Stop.  I'm not Pro-Government Intrusion (By any stretch), but to what level of shitty, incompetent, negligent, or murderous does a Corporate response have to be before Someone steps in?  Is the Japanese government concerned about offending the Company that put potentially ALL of Us in danger?  And the Government's response (nothing/lying) is worse.  I feel bad for the Japanese.  They used to trust their government and found out otherwise, the hard way.. Day 6 coming up, no end in sight, no way to tell what miracle it would take just for this to STOP.   

Excerpts:

The Japanese government's radiation report for the country's 47 prefectures Wednesday had a notable omission: Fukushima, ground zero in Japan's nuclear crisis. Measurements from Ibaraki, just south of Fukushima, were also blanked out.

Radiation experts in the USA say that the lack of information about radioactivity released from the smoldering reactors makes it impossible to gauge the current danger, project how bad a potential meltdown might be or calculate how much fallout might reach the USA.

Conflicting accounts of the radiation levels emerged in Tokyo and on Capitol Hill. Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Wednesday that the radiation detected at the Fukushima plant had fallen steadily over the past 12 hours. But U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) chief Gregory Jaczko told a House energy subcommittee earlier in the day that radiation levels at the Fukushima plant were "extremely high."

Japan earthquake: US alarm over nuclear crisis  From The BBC.

"They are leaving us to die," says the mayor of Minamasoma inside the exclusion zone.
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Britain has now advised its nationals currently in Tokyo and to the north of the capital to consider leaving the area.
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On Thursday, army helicopters dumped tonnes of water on reactor three - a day after they were forced to pull out amid concerns over radiation levels in the air above the site.

10,000 people go to get radiation exposure tests in Fukushima Pref.


About 10,000 people headed to evacuation centers and health offices in Fukushima Prefecture on Wednesday to take screening tests for exposure to radiation in the wake of troubles at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant following the massive earthquake, prefectural officials said Thursday.

G-7 to hold emergency talks on Japan quake, economic impact

The Group of Seven advanced economies will hold emergency talks by phone on the massive earthquake in Japan last week and its impact on the economy and financial markets, Japanese Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda said Thursday.
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The move comes as the yen briefly strengthened to a postwar record high of 76.25 yen versus the U.S. dollar earlier in the day in Sydney, passing through the previous peak of 79.75 yen reached in 1995. It traded at the lower 79 yen level Thursday afternoon in Tokyo.

Third wave impacts from the Earthquake/Tsunami will begin shortly within the Markets.  Speaking of which..

Guest Post: Alert: Nuclear (And Economic) Meltdown In Progress  Tyler Durden isn't kidding.

Note:  The substance of this alert centers on the unknown aftershocks that may result from the world's third largest economy, Japan, rapidly shifting from an exporter of funding to a consumer of it. In situations like these, we are by definition operating with incomplete and often confusing information, and events are developing more rapidly than they can be fully analyzed and internalized. We regret in advance any mistakes that we might make due to making calls and decisions in this highly fluid environment.

And:

Stage 1:  The world watches, riveted, as Japan suffers a tragic and horrible earthquake and tsunami, but as horrifying as these are, they are localized phenomenon affecting a relatively small percentage of the country. The real trouble lurks within damaged nuclear plants, which are now ruined and will never again produce electricity for Japan, creating instant shortages that will take years to remedy. Worse, a dangerous plume of radioactivity is carried south by winds. Tokyo partially empties and shuts down for all practical purposes.

Stage 2:  The abrupt slow down of the world's third largest economy alters the smooth flow of cash around the globe, and even causes reversals of some other long-standing flows. Chaotic eddies emerge in a decades-old pattern of ever-increasing flows of money into and out of the money centers, and various carry-trade and other interest-rate-sensitive strategies blow up. Manufacturing in Japan screeches to a halt, disrupting just-in-time manufacturing strategies both internally and across the globe.

Stage 6:  Everything changes. Faster than you think.

Thousands flee Tokyo as experts try to calm contamination fears

The stuff of science fiction novels and bad disaster movies has arrived in the world's largest metropolis after radioactivity was detected in Tokyo's city centre yesterday, the possible prelude to a disaster forewarned but never really expected: the meltdown of a nuclear power plant and the showering of fallout over 28 million people.

Experts and government ministers said that the radiation levels in the city were negligible, and that the battle to save the stricken plant in Fukushima was making progress. But they warned that contamination within the danger zone around the plant, about 300km north-east of the capital, was dangerous to human health, and told people inside the zone to evacuate or stay indoors.

No hysterical outbursts, just an endless stream of quiet grief

Given the extraordinary stories that have been told and the amazing images that have been beamed around the world, there was perhaps nothing especially remarkable about the way in which the tsunami struck the port town of Higashi Matsushima, 90 minutes of east of the city of Sendai, epicentre of the earthquake. To the north, the toll of the dead and missing in some towns alone has reached more than 1,000. So if the grief appeared quietly subdued in Higashi Matsushima – a town where at least 320 people have lost their lives and many more remain unaccounted for – it is only because of the scale of this tragedy.

Japan Quake: Latest Updates, March 16, 2011

The Corporate Spin begins..  General Electric Defends Nuclear Reactor Design Amid Japan Crisis 

*Surprisingly*, from Fox 5, originally from the Wall Street Journal. Excerpts:

General Electric defended the design of a now-stricken reactor it supplied to Japan 40 years ago, saying its containment system was safe and reliable, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.



Fukushima No. 1 plant's reactor No. 1, which experienced a dramatic explosion Saturday, is equipped with a GE boiling water reactor with a so-called Mark 1 containment system. There have been concerns about that particular design for years, with critics saying it is not as robust as later models.
And:
GE dismissed that criticism, in what appeared to be its first comments about equipment it supplied Japan's Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO).

"The BWR Mark 1 reactor is the industry's workhorse with a proven track record of safety and reliability for more than 40 years," Michael Tetuan, spokesman for GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, said Monday. "There has never been a breach of a Mark 1 containment system."

Until Now.  And there are how many now?  Also not the wording "design for years."  Also note the 1971 was 40 years ago.  Continue on..

Reactors At Heart Of Japanese Nuclear Crisis Raised Concerns As Early As 1972, Memos Show

In the early 1970s, just as a number of reactors were about to be licensed, Stephen Hanauer, a senior member of the Atomic Energy Commission staff, suggested banning "pressure suppression" methods to contain radiation in the event of a meltdown -- methods built into General Electric's Mark I and Mark II containment designs as well as Westinghouse's ice condenser design. The advice was considered and disregarded.


"Steve's idea to ban pressure suppression containment schemes is an attractive one in some ways," Joseph Hendrie, then a deputy director with the AEC, wrote in a Sept. 25, 1972, memo. Hendrie acknowledged that alternative, "dry" containments -- featuring the towers or domes commonly associated with nuclear plants -- had the "notable advantage of brute simplicity in dealing with a primary blowdown, and are thereby free of the perils of bypass leakage."

But regulators ultimately decided that the technology developed by General Electric and Westinghouse was "firmly embedded in the conventional wisdom." Banning it, Hendrie wrote, "would generally create more turmoil than I can stand." His memo was obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists through a Freedom of Information Act request.
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Today, three of six GE reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeastern Japan are in danger of meltdown after a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami. And 31 aging GE reactors of the same design -- 23 of them with Mark I containment systems and eight of them with Mark II--continue to operate in the U.S., raising concerns among both politicians and scientists. The Mark I containment is rectangular, the Mark II cylindrical. This NRC document explains the two in more detail.
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NRC Chairman Gregory B. Jaczko told reporters Monday that all U.S. nuclear plants "are designed to withstand significant natural phenomena like earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis. We believe we have a very solid and strong regulatory structure in place right now."

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But industry watchdogs see the fateful decision regulators made almost 40 years ago -- to choose political and economic pragmatism over tougher safety standards -- as endemic in the culture of the NRC as it deals with the prevention of low-probability, high-consequence accidents.
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They were designed to withstand a pipe break, not a meltdown," he said. It wouldn't take a major earthquake or a tsunami to knock out primary and backup power and push the systems to the breaking point; a hurricane or tornado could suffice.
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A 1975 report for GE by a team of scientists and engineers found that the company's boiling water reactors were more vulnerable to seismic events than pressurized water reactors -- such as Three Mile Island -- designed by Westinghouse and other firms.

"The PWR [pressurized water reactor] design is inherently more seismic resistant because of lower reactor vessel placement and the need to design for larger LOCA loadings," the report said. LOCA is an acronym that stands for loss of coolant accident -- the type of accident triggered by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. GE's research team said it would push to make the company's newer reactors more able to withstand earthquake-related stresses.
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In 1986, former NRC official Harold Denton told a group of utility executives that, according to commission studies, GE Mark I reactors had "something like a 90 percent probability of that containment failing" under accident conditions.

Read the whole article.

Japan suspends work at stricken nuclear plant

Japan ordered emergency workers to withdraw from its stricken nuclear plant Wednesday amid a surge in radiation, temporarily suspending efforts to cool the overheating reactors.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the workers, who have been dousing the reactors with seawater in a frantic effort to stabilize their temperatures, had no choice but to pull back from the most dangerous areas.

"The workers cannot carry out even minimal work at the plant now," Edano said, as smoke billowed above the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex. "Because of the radiation risk we are on standby."

This is happening, and it's rapidly spinning out of control..

Health risks of radiation depend on dose, duration  Frequently Asked Questions.

People are stocking up for the long term..

Magnitude 6.0 - NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN

69 km (42 miles) SSE of Mito, Honshu, Japan



95 km (59 miles) E of TOKYO, Japan


112 km (69 miles) ENE of Yokohama, Honshu, Japan


117 km (72 miles) SE of Utsunomiya, Honshu, Japan
 
NHK World TV streaming here.
 
What will spark the next Fukushima?
 
The gung-ho nuclear industry is in deep shock. Just as it and its cheerleader, the International Atomic Energy Agency, were preparing to mark next month's 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident with a series of self-congratulatory statements about the dawning of a safe age of clean atomic power, a series of catastrophic but entirely avoidable accidents take place in not one but three reactors in one of the richest countries of the world. Fukushima is not a rotting old power plant in a failed state manned by half-trained kids, but supposedly one of the safest stations in one of the most safety-conscious countries with the best engineers and technologists in the world.



Chernobyl blew up not because the reactor malfunctioned but because an ill-judged experiment to see how long safety equipment would function during shutdown went too far. So, too, in Japan, it was not the nuclear bits of the station that went wrong but the conventional technology. The pumps did not work because the power supply went down and the back-up support was not there because no one had thought what happened was possible.


Even though Japan had been warned many times that possibly the most dangerous place in the world to site a nuclear power station was on its coast, no one had taken into account the double-whammy effect of a tsunami and an earthquake on conventional technology. It's easy to be wise after the event, but the inquest will surely show that the accident was not caused by an unpredictable natural disaster, but by a series of highly predictable bad calls by human regulators.

Japan Quake: Latest Updates, March 15, 2011

Seismic Disaster, Nuclear Catastrophe, Continuing, Immediate, and Short-Range Dangers, Global Implications


Post-Tsunami Situation at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan: Facts, Analysis, and Some Potential Outcomes  Excerpts:

A special feature of the Mark 1 design is that the used fuel, also called spent fuel, is stored within the reactor building in a swimming pool-like concrete structure near the top of the reactor vessel. When the reactor is refueled, the spent fuel is taken from the reactor by a large crane, transferred to the pool, and kept underwater for a few years. This spent fuel must be kept underwater to prevent severe releases of radioactivity, among other reasons. A meltdown or even a fire could occur if there is a loss of coolant from the spent fuel pool. The water in the spent fuel pool and the roof of the reactor building are the main barriers to release of radioactivity from the spent fuel pool.

An explosion associated with Unit 1 occurred on March 12, at 3:36 p.m.2 At first the authorities stated that this was in the turbine building next to the reactor building. However, it is the reactor building roof and part of the walls near the roof that were completely blown off leaving only a steel skeleton at the top of the building. This indicates an explosion inside the reactor building – probably a hydrogen explosion, since hydrogen is much lighter than air, it would accumulate near the top of the building. The explosion therefore seems to have occurred near the level where the spent fuel pool would be located in a Mark 1 reactor.
..While Japanese authorities have stated that the reactor vessel is still intact, there has been no word regarding the status of the spent fuel pool structure, except indirectly (see below). Is it still intact? This is a critical question as to the range of potential consequences of the reactor accident.

The Idiocy and Hubris of Engineers: Will GE Get Whacked for the Catastrophic Failure of its Nuke Plants in Fukushima?

GE, the company that boasts that it “brings good things to life,” was the designer of the nuclear plants that are blowing up like hot popcorn kernels at the Fukushima Dai-ichi generating plant north of Tokyo that was hit by the double-whammy of an 9.1 earthquake and a huge tsunami.

The company may escape tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in liability from this continuing disaster, which could still result in a catastrophic total meltdown of one or more of the reactors (as of this writing three of the reactors are reported to have suffered explosions and partial meltdowns, and all could potentially become more serious total meltdowns with a rupture of the reactor container), thanks to Japanese law, which makes the operator--in this case Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) liable. But if it were found that it was design flaws by GE that caused the problem, presumably TEPCO or the Japanese government could pursue GE for damages.

In fact, the design of these facilities--a design which, it should be noted, was also used in 23 nuclear plants operating in the US in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont--appear to have included serious flaws, from a safety perspective.

Remember:  Any ONE of these events would be catastrophic.  Combine them, then throw in some secondary economic impacts. The micro to macro perspective of this unfolding event is staggering, even if the best possible-ending occurs.

 Wind patterns have changed,Tokyo in direct wind of Fall out, Rad levels rising  Wind direction simply explained.

VIDEO: Now There's A Volcano Erupting In Japan

Global Jet Stream Forecast (March 13-21st)


Fukushima Reactor 2 Hit By Loud INTERNAL Explosion
 
At 6:14 a.m. a loud thud rocked Reactor 2 of Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant, quite unlike the previous two blasts that blew apart the surrounding structures. This time the explosion occurred inside the steel containment chamber that surrounds the core reactor. The containment chamber captures and holds runoff water and condensed steam that escapes from the core reactor.


TEPCO and the nuclear safety agency have not explained the process that led to the blast.

In Monitor 3, the chemistry of splitting water molecules into hydrogen gas and supercharged oxygen was explained. In the first two blasts, these volatile gases recombined outside the reactor unit and blew apart the concrete rooms.


This third and latest blast is one of internal combustion.

At Japanese nuclear plant, a battle to contain radiation (Video)

Japan's prime minister says radiation has leaked from damaged reactor (Video)

Radiation Leaps After Reactor Fire; Tokyo Gets Warning

Japan warned radioactive levels had become "significantly" higher around a quake-stricken nuclear power plant on Tuesday after explosions at two reactors, and the French embassy said a low-level radioactive wind could reach Tokyo within hours.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan urged people within 30 km (18 miles) of the facility north of Tokyo to remain indoors, underscoring the dramatic escalation of Japan's nuclear crisis, the world's most serious since the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986.

Other than some random human interest stories, there seems to be no good news coming from anywhere in Japan.