Explanation... all the debris (possibly also radiation) from Japan
;)
PivotTechno
Please show me where it says that map indicates anything regarding radiation.
VDub
quote:
Originally posted by PivotTechno
Please show me where it says that map indicates anything regarding radiation.
Dude...
He said possibly...
Duh.....
PivotTechno
Oh, you mean "possibly, based primarily on alarmist speculation".
That kind of possibly. Now I get it.
exraver
TOKYO—The operator of Japan's stricken nuclear plant let pressure in one reactor climb far beyond the level the facility was designed to withstand, a decision that may have worsened the world's most serious nuclear accident in a quarter century.
Japanese nuclear-power companies are so leery of releasing radiation into the atmosphere that their rules call for waiting much longer and obtaining many more sign-offs than U.S. counterparts before venting the potentially dangerous steam that builds up as reactors overheat, a Wall Street Journal inquiry found.
Japan's venting policy got its first real-world test in the chaotic hours after March 11's earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power complex. By the first hours of March 12, an emergency was brewing inside the plant's No. 1 reactor.
By around 2:30 a.m., the pressure inside the vessel that forms a protective bulb around the reactor's core reached twice the level it was designed to withstand. Amid delays and technical difficulties, it was another 12 hours before workers finished releasing radioactive steam from this containment vessel, via reinforced pipes, to the air beyond the reactor building.
About an hour later, the reactor building itself exploded—a blast that Japanese and U.S. regulators have since said spread highly radioactive debris beyond the plant. The explosion, along with others amid overheating at reactors 2, 3 and 4, contributed to radiation levels that led to mandatory evacuations around the plant and the government's admission that the Fukushima Daiichi disaster ranks alongside Chernobyl at the top of the nuclear-disaster scale.
Experts in the U.S. and Japan believe the venting delay may have helped create conditions that led to the blast. In one possible scenario, pressure built so high that it damaged gaskets and other parts of the venting system, through which highly explosive hydrogen gas leaked from the core into the reactor building. It was Japan's cautious approach to venting, an outgrowth of its profound concern over nuclear contamination, that may well have made the accident worse, they say.
jester
quote:
Rikuzen-Takata was once a picturesque fishing town, a popular if offbeat stop on the tourist trail boasting a 900-year-old festival of floats and a coastline bathed in the azure-blue Pacific waters. Today it exists only in name. The muddy deluge of 11 March has torn the town from its roots, leaving a gaping wound of smashed cars, pulverised wooden houses and twisted metal girders. Car navigation systems still direct visitors to the post office and the local government building, which are no longer there.
Mayor Futoshi Toba surveys the ruins from his makeshift offices in Disaster HQ on a hill above the town. The day before our interview he asked the central government to fix the telephone network. "People can't locate their families," he says. "And the refugees are spread out over 80 different sites and aren't able to communicate with each other or tell us what they need. If they run out of water or toilet roll or blankets, we have no way to know." Mayor Toba is, by his own admission, running on empty. His wife is among the missing. Yet he must somehow keep this battered community running.
The logistics are forbidding, the human suffering overwhelming. Of the roughly 23,000 people who lived in this town before the earthquake and tsunami, at the time of going to press 2,400 are dead or presumed so. Over 3,600 buildings were swept away, including many apartment blocks; half the rest are partially or irreparably damaged, leaving over a third of the townspeople homeless. The tragedy is replicated across the northeast, where thousands of refugees still sleep on the floors of school gymnasiums and community centres. Around 400 of Rikuzen-Takata's homeless can be found in the Daiichi Junior High School a few hundred metres from Toba's office. Many have lost loved ones and few have insurance to rebuild. "It's hard to see the future," says Chio Okamoto, 78, who squats on a futon, reading a newspaper and shivering in the cold.
But in front of the school, the future is already being rebuilt. A hard-hat army has erected 36 temporary houses at astonishing speed, the first of 200 in this town. Eventually, there will be 40,000 of the 30 sq m prefabricated buildings all across the three hardest-hit prefectures of Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate. Each will have two rooms, with a kitchen and a bath, air conditioners/heaters and gas cookers. "We got the go-ahead to build on 19 March and were told to move quickly," says a spokesman for contractor Daiwa House.
Japan's Prefabricated Construction Suppliers and Manufacturers Association heads the effort, contracting out building to its biggest members, Daiwa, Sekisui House and Misawa Homes. The oldest maker of prefab houses in Japan, Daiwa ships the steel and wood frames to building sites in crates and labourers bolt them together. Local contractors bring gas, water and electricity to the houses. From start to finish, construction takes about two weeks. The houses are engineered to be warm, and quake proof.
But who will be the ones fortunate to get in? Toba explains the agonising calculus of allocating a precious but scare resource. The elderly, the physically disabled and women with children will be assigned the first half batch of houses, the rest will be chosen by lottery. Some pensioners may have to wait for months. "I'm by myself, so I imagine I'll be last in line," frets 75-year-old Tami Konno who has no children and was widowed years ago. Even mothers face rationing. "My children are older – 15 and 20," says a tearful Yurie Sasaki, who lost both parents and a brother to the tsunami. "I hear that mums with younger children will go first."
The construction workers are caught in a race against time. The local government must return the Daiichi School to its children for the start of term. The refugees will be bussed out to hotels, inns, hot spring resorts and anywhere else that will take them. Communities will be pulled apart, children will be separated from friends, old people are likely to become ill and die under the strain. "There are no easy answers," says mayor Toba. "Everyone is trying their best. We just all have to pull together until we see some light."
(Courtesy of Monocle)
I will try and post the picture they have in the magazine.
E2EK1EL
Japanese government nuclear adviser quits
A senior nuclear adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan has resigned, criticizing the government for ignoring his advice on radiation limits and not doing enough to deal with the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Toshiso Kosako, a professor at the University of Tokyo, was only recently named an aide to Kan on March 16, five days after a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami hit Japan
In a teary news conference on Friday night, Kosako said he could not stay on while the government set, what he deemed, inappropriate radiation limits for elementary schools near the plant.
"I cannot allow this as a scholar," he said, adding that he also opposed the government raising the limit for radiation exposure for workers at the plant.
The government has set 20-millisievert limit for radiation exposure as safe, but according to Kosako, that is 20 times too high, especially for children, who are considered more vulnerable to radiation than adults.
Plant workers are now allowed to be exposed to 250 millisieverts of radiation over a five-year period, up from 100 millisieverts.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that runs Fukushima Daiichi, revealed Saturday that the radiation exposures for two workers have been found to have reached the limit of 250 millisieverts.
Kosako went on to criticize the lack of transparency in Kan's government in dealing with the radiation leak and blasted it for not taking long-term action.
"I cannot help but to think [the government and other agencies] are only taking stopgap measures."
In a statement, Kan's administraton called the resignation "unfortunate," reiterating that the government "has consistently followed the advice of the nuclear safety commission in addition to the opinions from relevant sources."
The resignation is a major blow to the government. A Kyodo News service poll released Saturday showed that Kan's support ratings were plunging.
The poll reported 76 per cent of the respondents think Kan is not exercising sufficient leadership in handling the country's multiple crises.
Almost every day there are protests in Japan against the use of nuclear power.
About 1,000 protesters gathered Saturday in Tokyo's Yoyogi Park, chanting "No more nukes" and holding banners that read "Electricity in Tokyo, sacrifice in Fukushima."
More than 150,000 people have been forced to leave their homes in northeastern Japan due to the tsunami and nuclear catastrophe.
With files from The Associated Press
E2EK1EL
Home news
Japan’s nuclear chief steps down in disgrace
May 20, 2011 00:05:00
Yuri Kageyama
ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOKYO — The president of the Japanese utility behind the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chornobyl said Friday he was stepping down in disgrace after reporting the biggest financial losses in company history.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. President Masataka Shimizu, criticized for his low profile during the disaster’s early days, said he was resigning to take “responsibility” but vowed that the utility would continue doing its “utmost” to bring the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant under control.
Fuel rods appear to have mostly melted at three of the plant’s reactors after a March 11 earthquake triggered a tsunami that knocked out cooling systems.
Leaking radiation has prompted the evacuation of thousands of residents, and the perilous struggle to contain the reactors is expected to continue into next year.
The crisis raised serious questions about the lax oversight of Japan’s nuclear industry, and prompted the country to scrap plans to rely on nuclear power for one-half its electricity needs — up from its current one-third.
“I am resigning for having shattered public trust about nuclear power, and for having caused so many problems and fears for the people,” Shimizu told reporters, bowing in a traditional Japanese apology during a news conference.
“I wanted to take managerial responsibility and bring a symbolic close,” he said.
Shimizu’s resignation was widely anticipated because heads of major Japanese companies are expected to step down to take responsibility for even lesser scandals and problems. He had responded to earlier calls for his resignation by saying he needed to stay on to put efforts to contain the crisis on the right track.
Shimizu had come under fire for going missing from the public eye when the problems at plant initially surfaced, and then later checking into a hospital, although TEPCO never disclosed details of his ailments.
TEPCO has been criticized for being unprepared for the tsunami despite some scientific evidence that earthquake-prone Japan could be hit with a wave of that size. It has also been criticized as slow and lacking transparency in disclosing information about the plant’s problems.
Renewed safety fears have caused the government to shutter the Hamaokoa nuclear plant in central Japan, a region where a major earthquake is expected with nearly 90 per cent probability in the next few decades.
TEPCO reported that its losses for the fiscal year ended March 2011 totalled 1.25 trillion yen ($15 billion) — one of the biggest annual financial losses ever for Japan’s corporate world. TEPCO had a profit of nearly 134 billion yen the previous fiscal year.
Overall losses from the disaster are expected to be far bigger, including compensation for the thousands of people forced to evacuate from their homes around Fukushima Dai-ichi, and businesses such as farms that say products were damaged by radiation.
The company plans to sell its assets to secure more than 600 billion yen ($7.4 billion) in funding, but acknowledged it still could not assess the amount of damage payments.
“We will face a huge influx of compensation claims, but we don’t know their scale,” Shimizu said.
The quake and tsunami, which left 24,000 people dead or missing, damaged farms, ports and hundreds of suppliers. Those two disasters plus the nuclear crisis have pushed Japan’s economy back into recession, government data show, as factory production and exports stagnate.
The TEPCO board of directors promised to take no pay, and other executives will return from 40 per cent to 60 per cent of their paychecks, the company said.
But TEPCO must also shoulder the costs of resolving the problems at the reactors, as well as restarting other kinds of power plants, which aren’t nuclear, to make up for the electricity shortfall.
TEPCO also scrapped an earlier plan to add two more reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi.
The government has been studying possible bailouts, including using contributions from other utilities and taxpayer money to help TEPCO deal with the towering costs.
Replacing Shimizu, 66, as president is Toshio Nishizawa, 60, another TEPCO executive.
“Our company faces an unprecedented crisis. I feel I am shouldering an extremely heavy responsibility,” Nishizawa said.
Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 71, a former president, who took on a leadership role since the crisis, especially while Shimizu was absent, is staying on, in an apparent effort for continuity in tackling the crisis.
Shimizu said he will stay on as adviser indefinitely, without pay. The appointments become official after a shareholders’ meeting in June, according to TEPCO.
Moody’s Japan has warned it could further downgrade its debt rating for TEPCO to junk bond status if commercial banks forego on their claims for loans. Earlier this month, Moody’s lowered its rating by two notches to a level just above junk status.
Analysts say that all the bowing and resignations in the world can’t fix the nuclear plant.
“This is a very difficult task,” said Mamoru Katou, an energy analyst at Tokai Tokyo Research, adding that doubts are growing about the utility’s promise to bring the plant under control in nine months. “No one really knows.”
E2EK1EL
NEW YORK, N.Y.—A magnitude-6.7 earthquake rattled northeast Japan on Thursday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.
It was the same area of the Pacific where a massive magnitude 9 quake hit on March 11, triggering a deadly tsunami. At least 23,000 people were killed or left missing in those disasters, which destroyed hundreds of homes, offices and factories in northeastern Japan.
Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported that the Japan Meteorological Agency issued a tsunami warning for Iwate Prefecture.
The U.S. Pacific Tsunami warning centre said that it did not expect a destructive Pacific-wide tsunami.
There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries in the quake that hit at 6:50 a.m. Thursday.
It was offshore from Honshu island, and was some 524 kilometres northeast of Tokyo, the USGS said. The quake was 32 kilometres deep.
hardcore trancer
It is scary how the media barely pays any attention to the nuclear disaster in Japan and things aren’t looking great at all at the moment.
