Radioactive Japan's slippery slope: mafias and fascism

Two snippets of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Japan:

On one side Fukushima emergency... mentions that there was a mafioso mass dumping of radioactive materials in a river bed in Western Japan:

A huge amount of contaminated waste was found on the river bed in Shiga prefecture, western region of Japan.
According to the local authorities, among the waste include 2,300 tons of wooden tips contaminated by radiation as well as 77 sandbags filled with the same contaminated wooden tips.
The incident was came to light after an anonymous informant, possibly related to the illegal dumping, called in last month. The survey conducted by the local office shows up to 3000 becquerel per kilogram was detected.
"This is a possible illegal dumping case, though the place where they were brought from remain unknown." the authorities said.

 

Fascist repression against truth

(CC by Masaru Kamikura)

On the other side, actress (and former Miss Japan) Norika Fujiwara (pictured) has stepped forward against the implementation of fascist censorship laws that will severely punish whistleblowing and bring punishments against bloggers who expose the truth about the nuclear catastrophe, mentions EneNews, citing Japanese sources (→ Japan Times).

The new law, known as Secret Security Act, allows government to hide important information like radiation readings, to severely punish whistleblowing officials and even to exert censorship on the Internet at whim.

In a message posted on Friday, Fujiwara accused the government of covering up the truth about the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant, and spreading misinformation about radiation and leaks of radioactive water there.

“As a citizen I am really concerned about it,” Fujiwara wrote in another message. “Our nation has a right to know.”

Fujiwara joins the Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association in opposing the bill as a violation of the right to freedom of speech that will undermine Japan’s democracy.

“Once the bill is signed, the people who will write the truth on the Internet (or through other means) will be punished,” she stressed. “When I think of all the consequences that it will lead to, it really bothers me.”

New nuclear accident in Western Japan as typhoon batters the country

While the destroyed Fukushima Daichi Nuclear plant braces for a likely direct hit of a powerful typhoon, known as number 18, that has already caused major radioactive water overflow to the ocean, another nuclear accident threatens Japan: Monju nuclear power plant's fast breeder has suddenly stopped and crews can't access the site because of landslides blocking the only road. This nuclear plant is located at Tsuruga, near Kyoto.

Consequences are unknown at the moment.

Fukushima radiation continues climbing: x30 in just a week!

I already mentioned how this Tuesday water radioactivity in the collapsed nuclear power plant had spiked x15 in three days, well now, after six days, it is x30!

→ EneNews (citing NHK).

Fukushima: radioactivity spikes x15 in just two days

In TEPCO's own words:

... tritium levels in water taken from a well close to a number of storage tanks holding irradiated water rose to 64,000 becquerels per liter on Tuesday from 4,200 becquerels/liter at the same location on Sunday.

Source: Reuters (via EneNews).

Fukushima: reactors lose all water as soon as it goes in

This is just one of the many news I read daily on that brutal nuclear catastrophe of global implications which is Fukushima. I just can't keep up with all but the situation seems to be seriously deteriorating by the moment (or more likely it was all the time that way, just that we were not informed). 

A robot camera descending to Hell... I mean: one of the reactors of the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear site, found barely "inches" of water where there should have been at least 4.5 meters. 

The video published by TEPCO shows that the 400 tons of water injected to reactor 1 go down the drain into the ground as soon as they are poured in. As the Japan Times explains:

The water used to cool the fuel eventually flows into the turbine building, where it is believed to mingle with water intruding from outside. The turbine building is also connected to an underground trench that runs toward the coast. Highly radioactive water from the trench is believed to be mixing with separate groundwater flows before entering the sea.

This does not just happen in reactor 1 but it is probably the case of the three reactors which were active when the catastrophe happened. The storage of "spent" fuel (actually more toxic than "unspent" one) in the reactors themselves, two of which violently exploded, while another collapsed almost completely because of radioactive erosion and seismic movements, only adds to the severity of the problem.

The water flow from the mountains and the tides seems to be entering freely inside the destroyed reactors, incorporating all kind or radionuclides before it goes to the sea. Then it travels quickly across the Pacific Ocean with only limited dilution to the coasts of Canada and the USA. While the Pacific Ocean is really big, it seems not to be big enough to face a single nuclear catastrophe.

Sources: Fukushima Emergency..., Energy News.


Also for sushi-lovers, Simply Info mentions that South Korea is banning more and more fish and seafood imports from Japan because this country does not control the radiation levels of its produce. 

Japan: Governmente takes over Fukushima Daiichi disaster (mis-)management

As soon as they arrived they blamed "human errors" for the systemic problem of massive radioactive water seeping into the Pacific Ocean. It does not seem on first sight like they are going to do any better. 

The attitude of the Japanese Government so far has been disastrous, rejecting to evacuate the most contaminated areas (particularly most of Fukushima Prefecture, whose radiation levels are extremely hight, but in general all North Honsu) and campaigning in favor of absurd new myths like "radiation is good" and in general the attitude of pretend and extend. 

This may be just another step in their overall strategy of not facing the facts. Even in the best case they are already more than two years late.

Sources: Ex-SKF, Simply Info.

Philippines: massive demo in Manila against corruption

At least 50,000 Filipinos marched through Manila against government corruption. 

Recently it was found that several politicians pocketed a good deal of the public money destined to regional development by means of fictitious projects.

Source: Webguerrillero[es].

Fukushima: water reservoir under plant is much bigger, much more contaminated

From ABC (via EneNews):

Deep beneath Fukushima's crippled nuclear power station, a massive underground reservoir of contaminated water that began spilling from the plant's reactors after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami has been creeping slowly toward the Pacific.

Now, 2 1/2 years later, experts fear it is about to reach the ocean and greatly worsen what is fast becoming a new crisis at Fukushima: the inability to contain vast quantities of radioactive water.

The looming crisis is potentially far greater than the discovery earlier this week of a leak from a tank that stores contaminated water used to cool the reactor cores. That 300-ton (80,000-gallon) leak is the fifth and most serious from a tank since the March 2011 disaster, when three of the plant's reactors melted down after a huge earthquake and tsunami knocked out the plant's power and cooling functions.

But experts believe the underground seepage from the reactor and turbine building area is much bigger and possibly more radioactive, confronting the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., with an invisible, chronic problem and few viable solutions. Many also believe it is another example of how TEPCO has repeatedly failed to acknowledge problems that it could almost certainly have foreseen — and taken action to mitigate before they got out of control.

(... continues).

Regardless. What is clear is that you can't put gates to the sea, or in general to the flow of water (and air) through the planet. Each time a nuclear plant is built a huge danger is created because, among other reasons, there's always water nearby (they need it in huge amounts for the plant to work) and while in inland waters this is a huge problem hard to control, at the seaside it is simply total madness because the water table is in direct contact with the sea and almost indistinct from it. 

There's no good solution for Fukushima, which is totally unmanageable and off the scale - other than evacuating all North Honsu (and probably also all the Pacific coast of North America, where the vast majority of all radiation goes to). What we can still do is to struggle to close all other nuclear plants and impede that new ones are opened.

However we face the annoying issue of nuclear weapons (the real reason behind nuclear energy) being too desirable for every power-mongerer. So we have to work even further and harder into subverting the social relations of power radically if we really expect to ever solve this suicidal process of nukes and their terrible and long term consequences.

Note: I'm in general letting the media to speak out on Fukushima for a change. You will excuse me for partly ignoring the stream of news that is almost drowning us these days, however, except minor details, this is about the same I (and even more so specialist bloggers) have been telling since March 2011. So I'd suggest that if you're interested in the detail of the latest developments to follow now (as before) the specialized Fukushima blogs. Here the info will be (sadly) rather sparse because, you know, the World is so big and I'm so small in comparison... that I can't dedicate my time to every single piece of news.

Suddenly the media awakens to the harsh reality of unsolvability and perpetual contamination from Fukushima

Suddenly all the major media seem to awaken to the dramatic importance that this accident and in particular its unbound radioactive water flow into the Pacific Ocean means. CNN, BBC and The Wall Street Journal (among others) are reporting seriously on the matter for the first time since the catastrophe began more than two years ago and reporting even if not in full detail how extremely radioactive water is just flowing uncontrolled to the sea.

Interestingly the WSJ video mentions that TEPCO is now considering to isolate the destroyed utility from underground waters from the mountains, after realizing that the wall built to isolate the plant from the sea was actually worsening the problem by rising the water level. 

Can they dig deep enough? Fast enough? What about rain? What about all the radioactive water that will have already polluted the ocean by then? What about the water they continuously pump in just to keep the corium cool and semi-stable?

Nukes are a nightmare.

Via Enenews.

Japan's first astronaut on Fukushima catastrophe

Japan Times has an extensive interview with Toyohiro Akihama, the first ever Japanese astronaut, who was also the first journalist in space. Some time after his adventure, he moved to the countryside to experience the agricultural life, with the bad luck of ending up just 60 km from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The whole interview is of interest but he has something to say in particular about the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe and how Japan mismanages it:

In the world of engineering, you can’t have “absolute safety” — that’s why the “nuclear village” engineers can’t be trusted. How can they say nuclear power plants are absolutely safe? That’s not possible. Experts who call something safe when it can’t possibly be safe are living in a world of religion, not science.

(...)

I had reported on the fifth anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (in present-day Ukraine) and the Three Mile Island accident (in Pennsylvania in 1979), so I knew all too well what the governments of the U.S. and Russia had done. 

I had read books on how the Japanese government has dealt with nuclear accidents in the past. When there’s an emergency, what the authorities try to do is to maintain “law and order.” What is order? It’s protecting the system presiding at the time. (...) What does maintaining order mean to them? To maintain the order of the existing “nuclear village.”

(...)

What gave me the best pointer was the fact that President Barack Obama ordered all Americans to evacuate from within a 50-mile (80 km) radius (of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant). There was no better message than that. The government was bound to lie.

(...)

In Kyoto (where he now lives) we had a welcoming outcome (in July 21′s Upper House elections), with a member of the (antinuclear) Japanese Communist Party winning a seat. I don’t particularly like the JCP and I’m not a communist — if anything, I’d be more black than red (laugh). But when I read the statements by all the candidates running for the Upper House from Kyoto, nobody except for the JCP candidate said they were clearly opposed to the restart of nuclear reactors.

So the antinuclear voice was clearly expressed in the election. But the mass media failed to inform the voters. They treated the nuclear-power issue almost like a good luck charm. And Tepco only announced after the election that radioactive water from the Fukushima plant had seeped into the groundwater and flowed into the sea — but they should’ve known that already! Isn’t this media control? So my biggest theme at the moment is to stop the restart of nuclear reactors in Japan.

Fukushima nuclear catastrophe: nuclear fire (video)

What seems to be the remains of reactor 3 developed a fire yesterday or the day before (unsure), as it is very apparent in this security camera video:

Visually it would seem to be reactor number 3 but the automatic translation of a Japanese news site provided by Fukushima Emergency... reads:

According to the leak of TEPCO officials, current, Unit 4 and Unit 3 and Unit 2 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, further, is that the site and its surrounding facilities, nuclear fuel and are beginning to burn.

What seems to imply that all three southern units are burning, although I cannot confirm this yet. 

Source: Fukushima Emergency... (link 1, link 2).

Latest from Fukushima radioactive 'black hole'

Just a few of the many reports I read in the last days:

→ 6/10 evacuees died of leukemia (FEWCWD).

→ Fukushima radiation levels as high as in 2011 (FEWCWD).

→ 2.35 trillion Bq/m³ (cesium only) in seaside trench of reactor #2 (Fukushima Diary).

→ Extremely radioactive water leaking directly to the Ocean (Energy News).

The nightmare continues.

The absolutely mad radiation figures of Fukushima's ongoing 'China syndrome' - growing extremely fast!

William Boardman at Dissident Voice explains that we do not need to know what exactly is a measure such as Bequerel/liter (Bq/l), we just need to know that the Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) considers 10 Bq/l the highest safe limit in regular drinking water (60 Bq/l for nuclear plants' drinking water).

Probably because the corium has reached the water table under the collapsed Fukushima Daiichi NPP, the radiation levels are spiking like crazy these days:

On July 5, radiation levels at Fukushima were what passes for “normal,” which means elevated and dangerous, but stable, according to measurements by the owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

On July 8, radiation levels had jumped about 90 times higher, as typically reported. TEPCO had no explanation for the increase.

On July 9, radiation levels were up again from the previous day, but at a slower rate, about 22 per cent. TEPCO still had no explanation.

On July 10, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) issued a statement saying that the NRA strongly suspects the radioactive water is coming from Fukushima’s Reactor #1 and is going into the Pacific.

Then he provides some truly scary TEPCO (official) figures for July 8th:

9,000 becquerels per liter — On July 8, according to TEPCO, the company measured radioactive Cesium-134 at 9,000 becquerels per liter. Since TEPCO characterized this as 90 times higher than on July 5, the implication is that the earlier reading (about 100) was less than twice as toxic as the allowable limit and only 10 times more toxic than drinking water for civilians.

11,000 becquerels per liter – TEPCO’s measurement of Cesium-134 on July 9.

18,000 becquerels per liter — TEPCO measurement of Cesium-137 on July 8.

22,000 becquerels per liter – TEPCO’s measurement of Cesium-137 on July 9.

900,000 becquerels per liter – TEPCO’s measurement of the total radioactivity in the water leaking from Reactor #1. This radiation load includes both Cesium isotopes, as well as Tritium, Strontium and other beta emitters. There are more that 60 radioactive substances that have been identified at the Fukushima site. 

So, from almost safe levels (with many question marks because of the usual TEPCO obscurantism) on July 5th, the radiation being leaked to the Pacific Ocean had jumped a week ago (Jul 8-9) to 90,000 times the safe level. In just few days!

The latest official figure (from July 11th) is mirrored at Fukushima Diary, and is much worse (of course): 150,000,000 Bq/l, i.e. 15 million times the safe level!!!

Let's chew on these amazingly horrifying figures:

1. July 5th: ~100 Bq/l (x10 safe level)
2. July 8th: 900,000 Bq/l (x90,000 safe level: grew an average of almost 30,000 Bq/l per day)
3. July 11th: 150 million Bq/l (x15,000,000 safe level: grew an average of almost 50 million Bq/l per day)
4. If this explosive rhythm continues, today it should be like what?!

I honestly have no idea if and when this "spike" will reach its limit and what will happen afterwards (not declining surely), what I know is that this situation is totally out of control and is absolutely unprecedented. Humankind and all Earth is suffering the most ridiculously crazy radioactive pollution ever. 

And I also know that this is not in the first page of all newspapers as it should. Just by not looking at it the problem is not going to be solved at all! It may not even have any solution but whatever the case it must be talked about because, at the very least, the survivors (if there are any, an I'm beginning to doubt it) must learn from this cruel lesson. 

Japan: massive demo against restarting of nuclear plants

Tokyo:

Source: Fukushima Emergency, what can we do? (also → video).

Japan: scattered "mystery black substance" is concentrated radioactive fuel

Since the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe more than two years ago, we have been reading of a mysterious "black substance" that tends to show up in roadsides and other random places and shows very high levels of radioactive emission. Believe it or not, nobody until now had studied it with anything else than a geiger counter. 

In an interview at Fairewinds (Dr. Gundersen's site), Prof. Marco Kaltofen, President of the Boston Chemical Data Corp., explains that his team took samples to analyze, detecting high amounts of cesium isotopes but also of radium-226, a product of uranium disintegration. They do not have the means to detect the uranium directly but they strongly suspect its presence in the "black substance":

... this particle contains not only fission waste products from the reactor but very likely contains a concentrated unburned nuclear fuel. And that’s unusual. This sample had by far the highest level of uranium daughters that we’ve seen in a dust or soil sample.  We’re actually seeing material that might well have come from inside a failed fuel assembly.

Gundersen interprets it as being clear evidence of the containment being breached in the explosions of March 2011. 

There is a high risk of ingestion, especially among children and agricultural workers. 

Source: EneNews.

Fukushima: corium hitting the water table

I guess it was inevitable as the process of China syndrome goes on that the  corium (amorphous mass of nuclear-reacting material from the destroyed reactors) would eventually reach the water table, which is not far under the foundations of the seaside destroyed facility.

China syndrome process, from Roundtree7 (good article)

Unlike what happened in Chernobyl, where this process was at least delayed by means of the construction of a new underground floor at the risk of the lives of many workers, in Fukushima that has not been attempted at all, plausibly because the water table was simply too shallow. The whole consequences of the interaction of this extreme heat source with the water table are not yet known (will it explode?) but one thing is clear: the radiation levels are climbing fast, especially in the water:

Water sampled from the well Monday contained 9,000 becquerels of cesium-134 per liter and 18,000 becquerels of cesium-137, both about 90 times the levels found Friday, Tepco said. The well is near the turbine building for reactor 2 and about 25 meters from the plant’s harbor.

TEPCO is dissimulating these developments by means of not updating their English language site, although the scary data is anyhow available in Japanese (still not really reliable, as Mochizuki points out). 

Whatever they admit to, what is clear is that two years after the initial catastrophe the situation is not under control and looks like it will never be, releasing more and more radiation to the Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere in a destruction spiral that threatens all Humankind.

Water powered car... since 1969

This may be one of the main Filipino contributions to Humankind ever. Daniel Dingel, a Filipino engineer, has been developing and improving water-powered cars since 1969. It is just unbelievable that the revolutionary vehicle, that right now consumes only one liter of salty water per hour, has not replaced fuel-powered cars altogether.

In fact it has found all kind of troubles and obstacles, although the prototypes are actually running through the streets and highways of Manila with just a few liters of water. What are we waiting for?

Source: Webguerrillero[es].

Website: Watercar (Yahoo! groups).

Japan: Communist Party becomes second force in Tokyo - abstention reached 57%

The most notable feature of metropolitan elections in Tokyo was the outstanding level of abstention, reaching 56.5%, 11 percentile points above the last elections. 

The conservative Liberal Democratic Party - New Komei Party coalition (in power at state level) won 82 seats, followed by the Communist Party, with 17 seats (previously it had 8). The former second party, the Democratic Party, shrank to a mere 15 seats, with 13 seats going to minor forces.

The winning coalition therefore gathers quite less than 30% of the popular support: a clear legitimacy issue, even considering the weakness of the opposition. 

With 13 million inhabitants, Tokyo holds more than 10% of the Japanese population. 

Source: EXSKF.

Fukushima: first persont account of the mess in the accidented nuclear plant

Fukushima Emergency what can we do? publishes today a revealing and scary first person account (interview with a Fukushima Daichi worker) of how the emergency is being totally mismanaged by capitalist forces more interested in hiding the problems than actually solving (or at least patching them).

Some excerpts:

...  a lot of facilities were built in a rush. After the accident, facilities were being built in such a speedy fashion that it did not matter if they had to last for only one year or so.

...

... “cutting the budget, reducing the cost, and using lower price materials” for constructions and facilities in the management of the nuclear power plant accident is the order of the day.

...

... It is stinginess not only with money but with time, too. Orders such as “It is the fiscal year-end. So hurry up and complete the construction work!” are common. Sometime you hear things such as “It is the fiscal year-end, there is no more funding available”. Why should the “fiscal year-end” take priority over any other matter in an unsettled situation of a Level 7 nuclear disaster?

...

... It is getting really difficult to secure manpower for the accident management. ...

...

Original workers at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant are more and more exceeding their dose limit of radiation exposure. The workers from other nuclear power plants are returning to their former plants. Workers who come to Fukushima from other parts of the country to make money are decreasing and difficult to recruit.     

...

... No long-term plan for the decommissioning of the plant is put into execution. What is being done is rather the execution of a haphazard plan just to hoodwink the public attention. Issues out of the public eye are just left out.

...

...  the problem of the underground water storage tank is trivial, because the mother of all problems is neither the radioactive pollution nor the cooling system, but the nuclear reactor buildings and reactors themselves. How are reactors #1 to #4 going to be demolished and disposed of? The current situation is that nobody can even get inside. ...

...

About reactor #2, nobody knows exactly what is going on inside or what happened just after the earthquake. The explosion of reactors #1 and #3 could be simulated to a certain degree. From various parameters, we could predict the initial response and what was going to happen next.

But we are clueless about reactor #2. Why was such large amount of radioactive substances emitted without explosion? What is happening with the fuel rods? ...

...

... Let’s assume that the situation worsens to the point that it becomes impossible to pour water in order to cool off the reactor. For reactors #1, #3 and #4, a specialized squad prepared to bear the risks of radiation exposure can always enter the building and do the work required.
But in the case of reactor #2, radioactive emissions inside most buildings are extremely high that a prepared squad is likely to perish before it accomplishes its mission.

...

Interview originally published in Japanese at Magazine 9.

Fukushima: not just leaks but many criticalities as well

From Fukushima Emergency what can we do?:

Japan finds highly toxic strontium in Fukushima groundwater and levels are rising rapidly.

It isn’t just from leakage of contaminated water. Criticalities appear to be occurring at the plant, as evidenced by webcam observations. 

 

... continue reading at Fukushima Emergency...