Fukushima Report Delayed as TEPCO Gets New Chance to Explain
[font size="2"]Fukushima Nuclear Power Station Reactor No. 3[/font size]
Fukushima Report Delayed as TEPCO Gets New Chance to Explain
Jonathan Tirone
Bloomberg, May 4, 2015
The International Atomic Energy Agency delayed a report about meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to give Japanese officials another chance to explain radiation leaking into the Pacific Ocean.
The IAEA’s report about mid- to long-term plans to decommission the stricken reactors will be published in “mid-May,” agency spokesman Serge Gas said in an e-mailed reply to questions. The report had initially been scheduled for release by the end of March on the plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co.
“The Japanese government invited IAEA experts for a follow-up visit focused on contaminated rainwater issues and public communications,” Gas wrote in an e-mail from Vienna. “Tepco has no obligation to report to the IAEA but it still shares information with the agency regularly.”
SNIP...
IAEA monitors made an unscheduled return trip to Japan last month to follow-up on a spike in radiation levels caused by contaminated water leaking into the Pacific. While Tepco had known about the leaks for months, they didn’t discuss them with agency monitors during scheduled Feb. 9-17 consultations. Tepco subsequently decided to revise its communications policies and disclose more radiation data.
CONTINUED...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-04/fukushima-report-delayed-as-tepco-gets-new-chance-to-explain
Anyone know how much and what kind of radiation has been released from Fukushima over the past four years? There is no real containment of what's being emitted from three ongoing, open-air and out-of-control nuclear reactions.
= new reply since forum marked as read
GMC - 300E
Only lil over $100. Works perfectly.
Max background radiation here less than 16 CPM. ( Central FL )
On edit: God save the west coast.
When we pay billions in taxes, it's the least they can do.
I think this is a map of the plutonium cloud leaking from the WIPP facility in New Mexico that hasn't been mentioned much in the papers or on the tee vee:
Here's the source, an online outfit:
https://www.radcast.org/updates-on-wipp/
actually, were doing quite well thank you, other than the drought.
I need to take it to Publix in the produce aisle 
Japan's timid coverage of Fukushima led this news anchor to revolt — and he's not alone
Reporter: Sam Harnett
PRI, October 17, 2014
EXCERPT...
Japanese journalists did what Tajima calls "announcement journalism" in reporting on the crisis. He says they were reporting the press releases of big companies and the people in power. And he's not the only one who thinks so.
“I am a newscaster, but I couldn't tell the true story on my news program," says Jun Hori, a former anchor for NHK, the Japanese state broadcaster.
Hori says the network restricted what he and other journalists could say about Fukushima and moved more slowly than foreign media to report on the disaster and how far radiation was spreading. The attitude in the newsroom was not to question official information
“I was on the ground in Fukushima, and a lot of people kept asking me, why didn't you tell us earlier about what is happening?” Hori says.
Out of frustration, Hori started tweeting uncensored coverage. “I got a huge response,” he says, “but then my superiors said the NHK was getting complaints from politicians about what I was saying. They told me I had to stop.”
CONTINUED w/audio, video...
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-16/frustrated-japans-coverage-fukushima-crisis-japanese-news-anchor-started
"Announcement journalism" is great phrase.
The earthquake alone -- estimated an 8.0 at the plant -- is what caused cooling pipes to break and power to be cut and Fail-Safes to fail. All that way BEFORE the tsunami hit.
Fukushima: They Knew
This month marks the 3rd Anniversary of the Fukushima Nuclear disaster.
By Greg Palast for FreePress.org
Monday, March 10, 2014
EXCERPT...
I was ready to vomit. Because I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it: Shaw Construction. The latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.
But I had The Notebook, the diaries of the earthquake inspector for the company. I'd squirreled it out sometime before the Trade Center went down. I shouldn't have done that. Too bad.
All field engineers keep a diary. Gordon Dick, a supervisor, wasn’t sup- posed to show his to us. I asked him to show it to us and, reluctantly, he directed me to these notes about the “SQ” tests.
SQ is nuclear-speak for “Seismic Qualification.” A seismically qualified nuclear plant won’t melt down if you shake it. A “seismic event” can be an earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can’t run a nuclear reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.
This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking) standards required by U.S. and international rules.
Here’s what we learned: Dick’s subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company. No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn’t want to make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:
Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] “I believe these are bad results and I believe it’s reportable,” and then he took the volume of federal regulations from the shelf and went to section 50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and [they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies.
Wiesel then expressed his concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he would be fired, but that if he didn’t report the deficiencies, he would be breaking a federal law. . . .
CONTINUED...
http://www.gregpalast.com/fukushima-they-knew-3/
Which is why TEPCO, Japan, Nuke Inc and the USA went out of their way the other day to play up the tsunami's role:
Tsunami, not Quake, Seen as Main Cause of Fukushima Accident
by Mari Iwata
Wall Street Journal, Oct. 8, 2014
Japan’s nuclear regulator said Wednesday that the tsunami following the March 11, 2011, earthquake–not the quake itself–was the main cause of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The conclusion matters because of the implications for other nuclear-power plants. Virtually all of Japan is prone to earthquakes, but some places are relatively protected from tsunamis. Currently all of the nation’s 48 reactors are offline, and the government is weighing whether to restart some next year.
In the March 2011 nuclear accident, three reactors melted down after the plant lost main and backup power, paralyzing cooling systems.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority studied why the No.1 reactor lost backup power and concluded on Wednesday in a report that the tsunami was the main cause, based on data about temperature, pressure and other parameters. Those data were stable immediately after the earthquake hit at 2:46 p.m., suggesting the plant didn’t suffer critical damage until the arrival of the tsunami some 45 minutes later.
A previous investigation by Japan’s parliament had left more room for the possibility that the earthquake itself did significant damage.
The regulator said it would translate the report into English and post it on its website. The Japanese-language version is here.
“You cannot say there was no damage by the earthquake at all. But you can say the major cause was the tsunami, looking at the data,” said Tamotsu Kozaki, a nuclear engineering professor of the Hokkaido University.
CONTINUED...
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/10/08/tsunami-not-quake-seen-as-main-cause-of-fukushima-accident/
Which is not what the scientists said, way back when they were warning TEPCO, which elected to take the cheapskate's way out.
Here's a bit to add to the atomic pile:
Masanobu Shishikura: The Man Who Predicted the Tsunami in 2009.
British scientist 'predicted nuclear power station problem'
Toshiaki Sakai: Utility Engineer Warned of Tsunami Threat at Japanese Nuclear Plant in 2007
Apart from venting hot air in committee meetings, TEPCO did nothing, and hoped for the best.
Corporations who profit from all this, and who would never, ever lie to us? 
Jones and Palast are two peas in a pod when it comes to Fukushima (and a few other things). Why would you consider it a smear to say that someone agrees with one of them when they're saying the same things?
What's more, I don't recall Sabrina 1 bringing up any of that.
Really? I'm pretty sure I used quotes. Did DU erase the prior posts?
You've made the claim a dozen times and been challenged on it each time... never once providing any evidence... yet it's my responsibility to do the search for you?
They sent in top-of-the-line robots to see what's in there, but they froze it is so cold.
They sent robots in there and have had thermal sensors in there for years. It wasn't hot... in fact, it was below room temperature.
Must be that ice wall they built?
Ah!... that's right. You're one of the ones that read the enenews fantasies that the ice wall had failed. That they already tried, but can't build it because the ground is so hot that it just won't freeze. Heck... it just has to be insanely hot down there if it's warming up the entire Pacific ocean!
As with most of the realities that exist only in your own mind... that was never correct. They didn't start the freeze process until just a week or two ago... and so far everything has worked fine.
TEPCO’s contractors have begun the process of freezing the completed sections of the frozen wall. Blocks 1-8 are currently in the freezing process. Other sections are either still under construction or in the process of having the plumbing installed. The sections currently being frozen include the land side and north sides of the reactor building areas.
You should post the thread where you first claimed that it was a meltdown. We'll wait.
There isn't much left of the scores of threads from the initial days of the incident on google... but here's one from a couple weeks later.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=284642&mesg_id=284675
Unless you count "I'm going to click 'reply' and type something entirely unrelated - Oh I know! Let's use the 'ol 'they can't be insured' BS"
More than four years of posting on this stuff and still don't get even the basics of how a reactor works? That's stunning.
What's the source? Basic inalterable laws of physics... that's the source.
When a reactor is active, the fission reaction creates more than just heat for boiling water. It creates lots of other elements ("fission products"
, many of which are radioactive. Those elements give off heat as they decay (adding to the total heat) and many of their decay daughter products are also radioactive (giving off even more heat).
Once the reactor has been running for awhile, the active fission makes up only ~90% of the total heat that the reactor produces (IIRC). The other 10% is from the decay of other elements. Some of them have very long half-lives (and thus have low activity and put out little of that heat)... and some have much shorter half-lives (and thus have much higher activity levels and coincident heat production).
Once the reactor is turned off, fission stops almost instantaneously - but the reactor is still producing 10% of the amount of heat from when it was active. This drops off fairly quickly as those short-half-life elements disappear. Within the hour (about when backup power was cut off) it's down to just a couple percent of the initial heat. Then the decline slows.
Now... I'm sure that you remember most of that... but you're missing what it means. The largest bq-counts of the Fukushima release are never really counted, because they're "noble gases" that are lighter than air and have incredibly short half-lives. Nobody "counts" them because they couldn't impact anyone and were quickly gone. The largest bq release that people pay attention to was the radioiodine with its 8-day half-life (and most common health impact). It took a couple months for that to disappear entirely.
Those elements die off because they are produced by the fission and their levels rise in a reactor until the amount dying off (half every eight days) equals the amount being created in the active reaction. When the fission stops, they aren't produced any longer and start to disappear. But the point is that it's gone.
Here's the point to pay attention to. If you can't detect those elements... then there isn't any fission going on. You can't have fission without creating the fission products that go along with it. It isn't physically possible.
Radioiodine is incredibly easy to detect/identify and impossible to hide. None has been found for almost four years... and therefore there has been no active fission since the reactors shut down as the earthquake struck. Q.E.D.
Fukushima has three nuclear reactors in meltdown, where the out of control nuclear cores have breached containment.
Here's how they handled Chernobyl, with just one nuclear reactor out of control, 200 feet of concrete and the thing leaks.
Oh: The planned new "containment" cover is only a decade behind schedule.
The problem is... I only post what science actually says. Not "the science"
tm) that you invent as you go along.
Some simply scientific facts that you're incapable of accepting:
1 - There is no such thing as "man made radiation" - so I can only talk about how deadly radiation in general is.
2 - There is no point in time where you are free from radiation. It's all around you and inside of you. You are yourself radioactive.
3 - There's a massive amount of data on the actual health impacts of radiation of all types (yes, including huge numbers of people exposed to radiation from "man made" sources. And a large number of experts with actual specializations in the field of health physics. Not one of those experts agrees with the nonsense that you peddle. Not a single one. They must all be nuclear power salesmen... oh... except that almost none of them have anything to do with the industry.
4 - Additional cancer risk tends to increase in a statistically significant fashion at doses above 100 msv. It is often presumed for safety planning reasons that lower doses still cause an increased cancer risk in proportion to the dose, but for very low doses (single digit msv and below), the bulk of the evidence does not appear to support it. There is no evidence that incredibly low doses (comparable to small fractions of background norms) have any negative impact at all. But there is evidence to show that changed behaviors caused by irrational fears of radiation can harm you. In fact, virtually every death associated with Fukushima have been from side effects of prolonged evacuation and substandard living conditions. None of the deaths have been associated with radiation.
[font size="2"]Second mobile strontium removal unit at Fukushima, February 2015 (TEPCO handout)[/font size]
by Sandy Dechert
CleanTechnica, May 5th, 2015
The fourth anniversary of the multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi no. 1 power plant passed in relative quiet, but events there have hardly become less troubling. The good news first: TEPCO and its contractors have now completed the move of all spent and fresh fuel from the high and wide-open secondary containment of reactor Unit 4 to a safer ground-level location. They performed the work on time and almost without incident, despite the fears of many nuclear scientists and policymakers. Removal of molten fuel debris in Units 1, 2, and 3 will be more challenging, but Japan’s extensive experience with robotics should be helpful there, says Dr. Dale Klein, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and now chair of TEPCO’s Nuclear Reform Monitoring Committee.
SNIP...
The Los Angeles Times quotes Edwin Lyman, coauthor of Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster and a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, as saying that the post-accident management of water “has been a lot more complex than anyone imagined. If they are going to be restarting plants in Japan, they need to think harder about it.”
Kurion, a California company that TEPCO contracted with last year on water contamination, says it has a system that can separate tritium from water, but it must be scaled up to deal with volume present at Fukushima. Its president believes that the process would take 5-8 years. Setup would cost about $1 billion and operating costs would be several hundred million dollars a year.
SNIP...
Making matters worse for Japan’s nuclear industry on the whole is this development reported by Kyodo News:
Another April development occurred in Fukui prefecture, where a court blocked Kansai Electric Power from restarting two reactors at its Takahama site, warning of “imminent danger” to the surrounding area if the reactors were restarted. But on April 22, a court on Kyushu, third-largest of the country’s four main islands, rejected vociferous attempts to block restarting of two reactors at Kyushu Electric’s Sendai plant because of active earthquake faults and a nearby volcano.
CONTINUED...
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/05/05/continuing-surprises-mostly-unfortunate-japan-nuclear-industry/
Crop Circles. UFOs. Other Dimensions. Edge of Reality stuff that scares the Air Force and other members of the armed forces around the world. GOOGLE Frederick Valentich, Felix Moncla and Robert Wilson, or Thomas Mantell for example of brave people who have lost their lives in connection with UFOs.
Like I've written before: You help shut down their discussion by ridiculing those who are interested in them. Doing so is un-democratic, Major Nikon.
Those who say they do are ignorant of history and reality. Mocking me or anyone else for pointing that out serves to shut down discussion of what might be possible based on what people have seen, cameras and radar have recorded, and other physical traces indicate.
Like the time Rex Heflin was on the job inspecting highway signs in 1965 with his Polaroid?
Heflin never said he took a picture of an alien craft, just that he saw something he could not explain nearby. In addition to the photos, his radio conked out when the object was nearby, then worked OK again after it departed.
Santa Ana, California
Reports about these strange objects reveal a performance envolope that seems to combine energy and mass in new ways.
Here's a panorama based on a series of photographs taken by the expedition photographer of a Brazilian Navy research ship Almirante Saldhana in January 1958, the International Geophysical Year off the coast of Trindade Island near Brazil:
Close up of object as it appeared in frame on the left of the composite:
Trindade Island, Brazil
As for what it was, or UFOs are: Who knows? Rather than ridicule people for seeing something that doesn't fit in with one's belief system, FBaggins, I prefer to encourage them to come forward with their reports, photos and films. That way we might learn new things about something you prefer we didn't know about.
I'm not interested in talking about UFOs and wasn't in that post.
I was talking about the fact that it's physically impossible for the elements in that fuel to have a sustained nuclear reaction without the results that such reactions always have. When an atom fissions, you end up with the fission products... if there are no fission products, there was no fission. It isn't open to "we can't really know for sure" BS.
You can imagine an evil nuclear genie deep underground that can magic magically hide the fingerprints of a nuclear reaction if you like... just keep it to yourself. It's better for all concerned. 
I want the bastard that stole that hat- It meant a lot to me!
Or an anonymous poster somewhere on teh Internet?
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/05/05/continuing-surprises-mostly-unfortunate-japan-nuclear-industry/
Who to believe? Who to believe? What to do? What to do?
Dunno. But I do know "Don't worry about it" doesn't cut it for me or democracy when plutonium and all the rest spewing forth from Fukushima is concerned.
Since you made that claim. Thanks.
... since he's the one who claims that his career never got anywhere because nobody else in the field agrees with him. But the school likes to support a diversity of opinion... which is nice.
Or... you could just note that this Fukushima thingy has been in the news a bit over the last four years and no other nuclear "professors" (let alone actual professors) have backed him up.
Whether or not they actually laughed at a 40+ year nuclear professor that still can't tell the difference between fissionable and fissile and that cesium is more dangerous than... oh... say plutonium? Well... that's really just a measure of their generosity toward an older colleague. We can only guess.
You are a real trooper Octa, only the most obvious diehard apologists are left...all two of them!