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Japan's Tsunami 2011 (pg. 48)
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| E2EK1EL |
Home news
Aftershock in Japan leaves nearly a million homes without power
April 8, 2011 00:04:00
Jay Alabaster
TOMOKO A. HOSAKA ASSOCIATED PRESS
SENDAI, JAPAN—Nearly a million homes suffered blackouts in Japan’s northeast Friday after a new earthquake killed three people and piled more misery on a region buried under the rubble of last month’s devastating tsunami.
The northeastern coast was still reeling from the destruction wrought by a jumbo 9.0-magnitude earthquake on March 11, with tens of thousands of households without power or water. The 7.1-magnitude aftershock Thursday threw even more areas into disarray and sent communities that had made some gains back to square one.
Gasoline was scarce again, and long lines formed at stations. Stores that had only recently restocked their shelves sold out of basics Friday and were forced to ration purchases again.
Still, the latest quake did far less damage, generated no tsunami and largely spared the region’s nuclear plants. Some slightly radioactive water spilled at one plant, but the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi complex reported no new problems.
Matsuko Ito, who has been living in a shelter in the small northeastern city of Natori since the tsunami, said there’s no getting used to the terror of being awoken by shaking. She said she started screaming when the quake struck around 11:30 p.m.
“It’s enough,” the 64-year-old while smoking a cigarette outside. “Something has changed. The world feels strange now. Even the way the clouds move isn’t right.”
The latest tremor — the strongest since the day of the tsunami — cut power to more homes, though it was quickly restored to many. About 950,000 households were still without electricity Friday evening, said Souta Nozu, a spokesman for Tohoku Electric Power Co., which serves northern Japan. That includes homes in prefectures in Japan’s northwest that had been spared in the first quake.
Six conventional plants in the area were knocked out, though three have since come back online and the others should be up again within hours, Nozu said. But with power lines throughout the area damaged, it was not clear whether normal operations would be restored, he said.
In Ichinoseki, lines formed outside a supermarket when it opened Friday morning. An employee with a flashlight escorted each customer around the store and jotted the price of each selected item in a pad.
Most businesses were closed in the city, 390 km northeast of Tokyo. One restaurant owner, Suzuki Koya, bought a small gas stove and made free meals in big boiling pot.
“I saw the meat at the supermarket and I thought, ‘We should do a hot pot,’” the 47-year-old said. “It’s good to keep warm in times like these.”
Several nuclear power plants briefly switched to diesel generators but were reconnected to the grid by Friday afternoon. One plant north of Sendai briefly lost the ability to cool its spent fuel pools, but quickly got it back.
At a plant in Onagawa, some radioactive water splashed out of the pools but did not leave a containment building, Tohoku Electric said. Such splash-out is “not unusual, although it is preferable that it doesn’t happen,” according to Japanese nuclear safety agency official Tomoho Yamada.
“Closer inspection could find more problems,” said agency spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama, but no radiation was released into the environment at Onagawa.
The plant began leaking oil into the ocean in the first earthquake, and the flow escaped a containment boom in Thursday’s tremor but was contained again by Friday, coast guard spokesman Hideaki Takase said.
Thursday’s quake prompted a tsunami warning of its own, but it was later cancelled. Three people were killed. A 79-year-old man died of shock and a woman in her 60s was killed when power was cut to her oxygen tank, national fire and disaster agency spokesman Junichi Sawada reported Friday. The third death was an 85-year-old man, according to a doctor at the Ishinomaki Red Cross Hospital. He declined to give his name because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
That pales in comparison to the original quake and tsunami, in which more than 25,000 people are believed to have died.
Many of those bodies have still not been found: A significant portion were likely washed out to sea and never will be, but some are buried in areas that have been largely off-limits to search teams.
As radiation spilling from the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi plant has fallen in recent days, however, police have fanned out inside a no-go zone near the complex to dig for the dead.
On Friday, hundreds of police, many mobilized from Tokyo, used their hands or small shovels, pulling four bodies in an hour from one small area in the city of Minami Soma. The had found only five bodies the previous day.
The searchers, wearing white radiation gear and blue gloves, struggled to bring the remains across the rubble to vans and minibuses that would take them to the nearest morgue. Each body was carefully hosed off to rid it of radiation before being placed in the vehicles.
“The area is literally a mountain of debris. It is an extremely difficult task,” said an official with police in Fukushima prefecture who declined to be named because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
The epicenter of Thursday’s temblor was in about the same location as the original 9.0-magnitude tremor, off the eastern coast and about 65 km from Sendai, an industrial city on the eastern coast, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was strong enough to shake buildings for about a minute as far away as Tokyo, about 330 km away.
At a Toyota dealership in Sendai, most of a two-story show window was shattered, and thick shards of glass were heaped in front of the building. Police directed cars through intersections throughout the city on Friday because traffic lights were out. Small electrical fires were reported.
At the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, where nuclear workers have been toiling to plug radiation leaks and restore cooling systems ruined in the March 11 quake and tsunami, workers briefly retreated to a shelter and suffered no injuries. The plant operator said the tremor caused no new problems there.
Despite the new aftershock, automakers announced Friday that they were beginning to bounce back from the March monster. Toyota will resume car production at all its plants in Japan at half capacity from April 18 to 27.
The world’s No. 1 automaker said it remained unclear when it would return to full production in Japan.
Nissan also said it would start up domestic production at half capacity from April 11.
Operations had been halted at both companies because of part shortages. |
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| E2EK1EL |
75-year-old man stranded alone since Japan’s deadly tsunami
MINAMI SOMA, JAPAN—The farmhouse sits at the end of a mud-caked, one-lane road strewn with toppled trees, the decaying carcasses of dead pigs and large debris deposited by the March 11 tsunami.
Stranded alone inside the unheated, dark home is 75-year-old Kunio Shiga. He cannot walk very far and doesn’t know what happened to his wife.
His neighbours have all left because the area is 20 kilometres from the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant — just within the zone where authorities have told everyone to get out because of concerns about leaking radiation.
No rescuer ever came for him.
When a reporter and two photographers from the Associated Press arrived at Shiga’s doorstep Friday, the scared and disoriented farmer said: “You are the first people I have spoken to” since the earthquake and tsunami.
“Do you have any food?” he asked. “I will pay you.”
Shiga gratefully accepted the one-litre bottle of water and sack of 15-20 energy bars given to him by the AP, which later notified local police of his situation.
He said he has been running out of supplies and was unable to cook his rice for lack of electricity and running water. His traditional, two-story house is intact, although it is a mess of fallen objects, including a toppled Buddhist shrine. Temperatures at night in the region have been cold, but above freezing.
The Odaka neighbourhood where he lives is a ghost town. Neighbouring fields are still inundated from the tsunami. The smell of the sea is everywhere. The only noise comes from the pigs foraging for food.
Local police acknowledged they have not been able to check many neighbourhoods because of radiation concerns.
As radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant has fallen in recent days, however, the police have fanned out inside the evacuation zone to cover more areas.
On Friday, they were busy searching for bodies two miles (three kilometres) from Shiga’s farmhouse.
Hundreds of police, many mobilized from Tokyo and wearing white radiation suits, pulled four bodies in an hour from one small area in Minami Soma. They had found only five bodies the previous day.
The AP crew, which had been watching the police search, later broke away to see if it could find any residents living inside the evacuation zone. Some construction workers directed them to a part of town where some houses were intact.
The farmhouse where Shiga’s family has grown vegetables for generations is at the end of a long mud- and rubble-covered road blocked by fallen trees and dead and decaying animals.
The journalists spotted the relatively undamaged house about 500 metres (yards) away. Unable to drive on the road because of the debris, they navigated the rest of the way on foot, sometimes crawling over large branches.
Shiga was seen wandering in front of his house but went inside. The journalists went to greet him.
He said he spent his lonely days since the disaster sitting in bed in his dark home and listening to a battery-powered radio. A scruffy beard covered his face.
“The tsunami came right up to my doorstep,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to my wife. She was here, but now she’s gone.”
Shiga said he was aware of the evacuation order but could do nothing about it, since he is barely able to walk past the front gate of his house. His car is stuck in mud and won’t start.
The AP journalists asked Shiga for permission to tell the authorities about him. He agreed, and they went to a police station to tell them about the stranded farmer. The police said they would check on him as soon as they could.
Even if authorities can make it to him, Shiga said he might rather stay.
“I’m old and I don’t know if I could leave here. Who would take care of me?” he said, staring blankly through his sliding glass doors at the mess in his yard. “I don’t want to go anywhere. But I don’t have water and I’m running out of food.” |
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| VDub |
| quote: | Originally posted by E2EK1EL
Yeah this is my 3rd time watching it.
I assume China for sure :p |
Of course...
Where else... |
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| E2EK1EL |
Japan nuclear crisis may be on par with Chernobyl
TOKYO—Japan is considering raising the severity level of its nuclear crisis to put it on a par with the Chernobyl accident 25 years ago, the worst atomic power disaster in history, Kyodo News Agency reported on Tuesday.
The report came as the government expanded an evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant because of the high levels of accumulated radiation since a 15-metre tsunami ripped through the complex a month ago, causing massive damage to its reactors which engineers are still struggling to control.
The Kyodo report said that the high levels of radiation that have been released by the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant meant it could raise the severity level from 5 to the highest 7, the same as the 1986 Chernobyl accident.
It said the government’s Nuclear Safety Commission had estimated that at one stage the amount of radioactive material released from the reactors in northern Japan had reached 10,000 terabequerels per hour of radioactive iodine 131 for several hours, which would classify the incident as a major accident according to the INES scale.
The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) is published by the International Atomic Energy Agency and ranks nuclear and radiological accidents and incidents by severity from 1 to a maximum of 7.
The Kyodo report did not say when the estimate related to.
Japan had previously assessed the accident at reactors operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) at level 5, the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in the United States in 1979.
The tsunami was triggered by March 11 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the largest recorded in quake-prone Japan, crippling the reactors’ cooling systems.
A spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Japan’s nuclear safety watchdog, said on Tuesday that the level of the Fukushima incident was still a 5 and that he was unaware of any move by the government to raise the level.
TEPCO said it had stopped the discharge of low-level radioactive water into the sea that had drawn complaints from neighbouring China and South Korea.
It has already pumped 10,400 tonnes of low-level radioactive water into the ocean to free up storage capacity for highly contaminated water from the reactors.
On Monday, shortly after Japan marked one month since the quake, a huge aftershock shook a wide swathe of eastern Japan, killing two people, and knocking out power to 220,000 homes.
It was one of more than 400 aftershocks above a 5 magnitude to have hit the area since March 11.
Because of accumulated radiation contamination, the government is encouraging people to leave certain areas beyond its 20 km (12 mile) exclusion zone around the plant. Thousands of people could be affected by the move.
“These new evacuation plans are meant to ensure safety against risks of living there for half a year or one year,” he said. There was no need to evacuate immediately, he added.
TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu visited the area on Monday for the first time the disaster. He had all but vanished from public view apart from a brief apology shortly after the crisis began and has spent some of the time since in hospital.
“I would like to deeply apologize again for causing physical and psychological hardships to people of Fukushima prefecture and near the nuclear plant,” said a grim-faced Shimizu.
Dressed in a blue work jacket, he bowed his head for a moment of silence with other TEPCO officials at 2:46 p.m. (0546 GMT), exactly a calendar month after the earthquake hit.
RADIOACTIVE WATER
Engineers at the plant north of Tokyo said they were no closer to restoring the plant’s cooling system, which is critical to bring down the temperature of overheated fuel rods and to bringing the six reactors under control.
In a desperate move to cool the highly radioactive fuel rods, TEPCO has pumped water onto reactors, some of which have experienced partial meltdown.
But the strategy has hindered moves to restore the plant’s internal cooling system as engineers have had to focus on how to store 60,000 tonnes of contaminated water.
Engineers are also pumping nitrogen into reactors to counter a buildup of hydrogen and prevent another explosion sending more radiation into the air, but they say the risk of such a dramatic event has lowered significantly since March 11.
The triple disaster is the worst to hit Japan since World War Two, leaving nearly 28,000 dead or missing and rocking the world’s third-largest economy.
Concern at the government’s struggle to handle the situation is mounting, with Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s ruling party suffering embarrassing losses in local elections on Sunday.
Voters vented their anger at the government’s handling of the nuclear and humanitarian crisis, with Kan’s ruling Democratic Party of Japan losing nearly 70 seats in local elections. |
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| hardcore trancer |
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Japan to raise Fukushima crisis level to worst The Japanese government's nuclear safety agency has decided to raise the crisis level of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant accident from 5 to 7, the worst on the international scale. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency made the decision on Monday. It says the damaged facilities have been releasing a massive amount of radioactive substances, which are posing a threat to human health and the environment over a wide area. The agency used the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, or INES, to gauge the level. The scale was designed by an international group of experts to indicate the significance of nuclear events with ratings of 0 to 7. On March 18th, one week after the massive quake, the agency declared the Fukushima trouble a level 5 incident, the same as the accident at Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979. Level 7 has formerly only been applied to the Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union in 1986 when hundreds of thousands of terabecquerels of radioactive iodine-131 were released into the air. One terabecquerel is one trillion becquerels. The agency believes the cumulative amount from the Fukushima plant is less than that from Chernobyl. Officials from the agency and the Nuclear Safety Commission will hold a news conference on Tuesday morning to explain the change of evaluation. Tuesday, April 12, 2011 05:47 +0900 (JST)
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This is not good AT ALL.:sadgreen: |
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| geroin |
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011...E72A0SS20110412
(Reuters) - Japan put its nuclear calamity on a par with the world's worst nuclear disaster, Chernobyl, on Tuesday after new data showed that more radiation leaked from its earthquake-crippled power plant in the early days of the crisis than first thought.
Japanese officials said it had taken time to measure radiation from the plant after it was smashed by March 11's massive quake and tsunami, and the upgrade in its severity rating to the highest level on a globally recognized scale did not mean the situation had suddenly become more critical.
"The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is slowly stabilizing, step by step, and the emission of radioactive substances is on a declining trend," Prime Minister Naoto Kan told a press briefing on Tuesday.
Kan said he wanted to move from emergency response to long-term rebuilding.
"A month has passed. We need to take steps toward restoration and reconstruction," he said.
He also called on opposition parties, whose help he needs to pass bills in a divided parliament, to take part in drafting reconstruction plans from an early stage.
The operator of the stricken facility appears to be no closer to restoring cooling systems at the reactors, critical to lowering the temperature of overheated nuclear fuel rods. Late on Tuesday, Japan's science ministry said small amounts of strontium, one of the most harmful and long-lasting radioactive elements, had been found in soil near Fukushima Daiichi.
Hidehiko Nishiyama, a deputy director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), said the decision to raise the severity of the incident from level 5 to 7 -- the same as the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986 -- was based on cumulative quantities of radiation released.
No radiation-linked deaths have been reported since the earthquake struck, and only 21 plant workers have been affected by minor radiation sickness, according to Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano.
"Although the level has been raised to 7 today, it doesn't mean the situation today is worse than it was yesterday, it means the event as a whole is worse than previously thought," said nuclear expert John Price, a former member of the Safety Policy Unit at the UK's National Nuclear Corporation.
"NOWHERE NEAR CHERNOBYL"
A level 7 incident means a major release of radiation with a widespread health and environmental impact, while a 5 level is a limited release of radioactive material, with several deaths, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Several experts said the new rating exaggerated the severity of the crisis.
"It's nowhere near that level. Chernobyl was terrible -- it blew and they had no containment, and they were stuck," said nuclear industry specialist Murray Jennex, an associate professor at San Diego State University in California.
"Their containment has been holding, the only thing that hasn't is the fuel pool that caught fire." |
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| VDub |
OH MY GOD IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!!!!
Or...
You can read this....
But yah they've got big problems over there still... |
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| geroin |
| quote: | Originally posted by VDub
OH MY GOD IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!!!!
Or...
You can read this....
But yah they've got big problems over there still... |
still? lol
you realize this is not like a temp issue right?
what kills me is the denial of the seriousness of this tragedy ever since it happened from day one all the way up until now.
and it is exactly what i've been trying to say since day one but all i was getting was some bs website reports telling me everything is AOK.
Death toll being low just to radiation does not mean that it will not be killing thousands and millions 10-50 years from now. |
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| geroin |
| quote: |
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story...-radiation.html
Slightly higher radiation found in Ontario
Higher-than-normal radiation levels have been detected in Ontario as a result of the nuclear crisis in Japan, but officials said Tuesday the increase is so small it doesn't pose a health risk.
Energy Minister Brad Duguid said levels have gone up slightly, but he didn't have any specific details on whether the increases were found in water, air or food.
"There has been some detection of some minor increase in radiation, but it's not anywhere close to something that would impact human health," Duguid told reporters. "It's not something that Ontario residents need to be overly concerned about."
The news comes one day after Japan increased the severity rating of the crisis at the tsunami-ravaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant to the same level as the Chornobyl disaster.
The energy minister's office distributed information from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and Health Canada on normal background radiation and some radiation that may "have been carried by the wind" from Japan to this country.
"Natural background radiation varies from location to location, but Health Canada's data does not show an increase over and above the normal day-to-day fluctuations," said the safety commission.
"However, very minute levels of isotopes in the radiation have been attributed to the release in Japan."
The actual increase in radiation "is so small that it is extremely difficult to measure against normal background radiation," said the commission. "The findings from these detectors further confirm that radiation doses do not pose a health risk to Canadians."
Dr. Arlene King, Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health, said all imported and domestic products tested by the federal government are below Health Canada's action levels for harmful radiation.
"Based on current information, I am of the view that there is no health risk for Ontarians from the damaged nuclear facility in Japan," King said in a statement.
Ontario Environment Minister John Wilkinson said there are no radiation problems with the province's drinking water.
"The water in Ontario is safe, but given the situation in Japan we are using increased vigilance," he said.
Agriculture Minister Carol Mitchell said it was up to the Canada Food Inspection Agency to determine if there was any radiation in food or milk sold in Ontario.
"All of the milk that is sold within Ontario is sterilized, pasteurized," said Mitchell.
Ontario's New Democrats said they couldn't believe the provincial government knows so little about radiation levels a full month after Japan's nuclear crisis began.
"It's quite disconcerting," said NDP Leader Andrea Horwath. "The people of this province just want to know their water is safe, their food is safe, their milk, and it's quite surprising that we couldn't get the answers out of the government today."
The NDP pointed out that elevated radiation levels already have been reported in several eastern American cities, including in milk from Vermont, Arkansas, California and Arizona, and in the water in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Idaho and Tennessee.
"There's obvious monitoring going on in other jurisdictions," said Horwath. "If they're doing testing and letting people know what's happening, Ontario residents should expect nothing less."
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this sounds very promising, doesn't it?
who cares though? no one has died yet and there is no health risk. |
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| FunkyCrew |
Gera's argumentative skills are redonculous, ^5 mate - you remind me of my parents sometimes lol
"told ya so told ya so told ya so, you're stooooopid!"
I'm not even gonna address this for the upteenth time. |
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| E2EK1EL |
| quote: | Originally posted by FunkyCrew
"told ya so told ya so told ya so, you're stooooopid!"
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LOL
You forgot one more "so"
"told ya so told ya so told ya so, you're soooooooooooooooooooo stooooopid!" |
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