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robuzo

Ahem. Interesting article from FT about the rising resistance to restarting the nukes. They make a comparison to the protests, and eventual riots, of the 1960's against support for the US war in Vietnam, which may be true in terms of actual numbers of people in the streets, but that in itself is not a hopeful sign because the mistakes made by the left in the '60's resulted in Japan have virtually no viable opposition in politics to the right-wingers, a situation that persists to some extent today. The article also points out that these are citizen protests (since there is no viable left. . .), and as such different, but by the same token, at some point they need to gel around some kind of organizing force. Right now it would seem the government is just trying to let people blow off steam, although from what I have seen in the J-media and heard from people there, the cops are out in force at the protests and very forceful about restricting the movements of the demonstrators:

Japan nuclear protesters take to streets - FT.com

It has been slow for a chain reaction, but more than a year after the biggest nuclear crisis in a quarter century, Japanese demonstrations against atomic power are beginning to generate serious steam.
A string of some of Japan’s biggest protests in decades – each attended by tens of thousands of people – have in recent weeks given voice to a wave of anti-nuclear sentiment caused by the failure of the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant on March 11, 2011.

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. Japan nuclear protesters take to streets - FT.com

__________________
露武蔵

misskit

The protest photos show the crowd is made up mostly of older people, something I find rather striking.

The other development I find surprising is the newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, seems to have a pro-protest stance where in the past has been supportive of business.

robuzo

Lots of people with kids, too.

Asahi is generally viewed as the more left-leaning of the papers; Yomiuri is right-wing, Mainichi a bit to the left of the Yom, and Sankei is hard right.

misskit

^ Oh my, I needed more coffee before I posted! My bad, I had Asahi and Yomuri confused this morning.

I am no longer surprised. Yomuri is still pro-business and backing the prime minister to start all the reactors.

nostromo

Get all reactors online asap, I fully support Japanese govt on this, country needs power. And the most important thing is, global warming is not a joke. Think about your children or their children. Now these erratic weather patters - flooding here, drought there, cold and hot in wrong places, apparently do not have anything to do with that. But no one really knows.

About using that power, Japan is efficient, but not efficient enough according to the editorial in JTO below. US report found UK, Germany and (surprisingly) Italy ahead of Japan. Still a good ranking.

The Japan Times Online
Sunday, July 22, 2012

EDITORIAL
Japan as number four
A new report on how the world's major powers use electricity found that Japan ranks fourth out of the top 12 countries in energy efficiency. While this result is not bad, it is still not good enough.



Inefficient use of energy poses a serious obstacle to economic recovery as money that could be used in meaningful areas is instead wasted on energy. The government and the private sector must do all they can to increase energy efficiency.

The new report, from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, looked at the world's 12 largest economies, which account for more than 78 percent of global gross domestic product, 63 percent of global energy consumption and 62 percent of the global carbon footprint.

The report found that the United Kingdom came first, followed by Germany and Italy, with Japan in fourth place. America ranked ninth, while France, Australia and China followed closely behind Japan.

Japan's ranking came from being second place in national effort and second place in industrial energy use, though it was ninth in buildings and eighth in transportation.

Those results point in the direction of a better energy policy, one that relies on many means of achieving increased efficiency. The national effort to reduce energy usage following the Fukushima nuclear disaster was quite successful, but without stricter regulations on buildings and transportation, Japan is unlikely to make headway.

Energy efficiency should be a more integrated part of building codes and appliance standards, although updating older buildings will be difficult. Improving Japan's electric grid infrastructure is another important element. All of these possibilities are better than simply restarting dangerous nuclear power plants.

Japan's public transportation is rather efficient, but the use of heavy-duty and passenger vehicles as well as reliance on air travel accounts for the relatively low eighth-place ranking in transportation. The Japanese government should understand how much public transportation contributes to a dynamic economy. The efficient movement of people is a double benefit if done properly because it saves energy and gets people into activities that contribute to the economy.

Improving energy efficiency is just as important to the economy as banking or financial policies. In one sense, energy is where the economy meets the reality of the material world.

Japan ranked relatively high on its overall commitment and general performance, but it must be re-emphasized that efficient energy use means an efficient economy. The government needs to help encourage better energy usage. The future of the economy depends on it.

Japan as number four | The Japan Times Online

Mid

Japan utility gets $12.8bn nuclear crisis bailout
Jul 31, 2012

TOKYO (AP) — The Japanese utility that operates the nuclear power plant sent into meltdown by last year’s tsunami says it has received a trillion yen ($12.8 billion) public bailout.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. apologized Tuesday for the “inconvenience and anxiety” from the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in northeastern Japan, and for raising electricity charges to cover the costs of dealing with the crisis.

The company, now under government control, still faces massive compensation demands from those forced to evacuate and whose land and products were contaminated by spewing radiation following the disaster that began March 11 last year.

TEPCO must also shoulder the enormous costs of decommissioning three reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi that went into meltdown. It must also put nuclear fuel at a fourth reactor there into safe storage.

asiancorrespondent.com

__________________
"Keeping quiet while monks and other peaceful protesters are murdered and jailed is not evidence of constructive engagement." - Arvind Ganesan, Human Rights Watch.

"I think...I think it's in my basement. Let me go upstairs and check" - M.C. Escher

robuzo

^Getting bailed out by the taxpayers and raising rates. Nice reward for their failure.

ENT

No amount of Bailing out is going to help Japan. The damage is already done, and the Daichi plant at Fukushima is the biggest nuclear disaster to date, up tp 4 times worse than the Chernobyl disaster.

_____
A number of seismologists, engineers and policy makers say they believe last year’s magnitude-9 quake may have played a part in damaging the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and contributing to massive radioactive releases there—despite the government’s view that such a scenario is “unlikely.”

“The possibility of the quake contributing to the Fukushima disaster should not be ruled out,” said Sumio Mabuchi, a senior ruling-party lawmaker, who calls for new safety guidelines on the assumption that a major quake could strike anywhere in Japan.

The area around Fukushima Daiichi sank half a meter after the March 2011 quake. But data received so far indicate the ground movement didn’t significantly damage key parts of the plant

Critics say the earthquake may have damaged some of the myriad pipes that circulate water through the reactors.

Cumulative radiation doses for workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant over the one-year period since the start of the disaster increased roughly 16-fold from the previous year, data compiled by the plant operator showed Wednesday.

The surge is partly attributed to an increase in the number of workers at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. plant who engaged in containing the nuclear disaster, and to the elevated levels of radiation in which the workers had to work in doing so.

An executive from a Tokyo Electric Power Co. subcontractor tried to force its workers at the crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to cover their radiation monitoring meters with plates made of lead in an apparent attempt to underreport radiation exposure, sources close to the matter said Saturday.

The executive in his 50s, who works for a company based in Fukushima Prefecture, told around 10 plant workers to attach the plates to the alarm pocket dosimeters that the utility known as TEPCO had provided them with to monitor their radiation exposure, the sources said. The ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has started investigating the matter.

The workers were hired for about four months through last March to wrap pipes at a water treatment facility with heat insulators.

The data apparently point to the need for measures to reduce workers’ radiation exposure, such as by making increased use of robots
____http://enenews.com/just-in-fukushima-daiichi-workers-ordered-to-cover-dosimeters-with-lead-plate

Radiation released by the Daiichi plant and its prevalence in the environment.
Radiation in daily life.
Who cares? Helen Caldicott and Kate Orff in conversation 04-02-12 - YouTube!

robuzo

^It's all about the MOX. The difficulty of dealing with spent fuel has always been the Achilles heel of nuclear power. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of reprocessing it for reuse, and the industry went for it like a cat on a day-old sardine. I suppose storing hundreds of tons of spent fuel on the roof of a nuclear reactor in one of the most geologically unstable locations on the planet (not to mention on a beach in the country that invented the word tsunami) showed a lot of moxie, if "moxie" means "hubris."

Mid

#Fukushima Peaches to Be Exported to Thailand, Starting Late August
Friday, August 10, 2012

Buyers from Thailand say they are satisfied with the testing procedure that the Fukushima prefectural government has in place.

To recap that testing method (for more details about peaches in Fukushima, see my previous post about Fukushima peaches offered to the Imperial Family):

• Take a small amount of sample from each peach farmer.
• Test it using the NaI scintillation survey meter with high detection limit (probably 25 becquerels/kg).
• If the sample registers more than 50 becquerels/kg, then test it with the germanium semiconductor detector that the prefectural government owns, again with relatively high detection limit (about 10 becquerels/kg).
• If the sample tested using the germanium semiconductor detector has less than 100 becquerels/kg, all clear!

Looking at the pictures of how they test using the NaI scintillation survey meter (click to enlarge), the sample size looks no more than 100 milliliters. Testing laboratories run by the citizens' groups in Japan and by private companies require at least 1 liter (1,000 milliliters) of samples to be effective, and they use the same or better NaI scintillation survey meters.

The article below from Fukushima Minpo says one additional thing and that's troubling; rice from Fukushima has been exported overseas AFTER the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident. I wasn't aware of that news.

From Fukushima Minpo (8/10/2012):

県産モモ、今月下旬輸出　タイのバイヤーが県庁訪問

Peaches produced in Fukushima to be exported, starting late August; Buyers from Thailand visit the prefectural office

日本貿易振興機構（ジェトロ）がタイのバイヤーを招いた福島県産モモの商談会で９日、県産モモを今月下旬か らタイへ輸出することが決まった。東京電力福島第一原発事故後、県産農産物を海外に輸出するのはコメに続き ２例目で、モモは初めて。

It was agreed in the meeting with the buyers from Thailand invited by JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization) that peaches grown and harvested in Fukushima Prefecture will be exported to Thailand starting late August. This will be the second case of Fukushima produce to be exported overseas, after the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident, following the rice; it will be the first for peaches.

輸入を決めたのは、タイの百貨店やスーパーのバイヤー。県北地区の果樹園で収穫されるモモを中心に、１０月 上旬ごろまで輸出する予定。量は今後調整する。タイ政府が指定する日本国内の検査機関で放射性物質を検査し 、安全性が確認され次第、空路で輸出する。

The buyers for department stores and supermarkets in Thailand decided to import [the peaches]. Peaches harvested mostly in the orchards in the northern district of Fukushima will be exported till early October. The amount of export will be determined between the parties. The peaches will be tested for radioactive materials at a laboratory in Japan designated by the Thai government, and as soon as the safety is confirmed they will be delivered by air.

バイヤー一行は９日、県庁を訪れ、担当者から放射性物質検査の状況や味の特徴の説明を受けた。バイヤーの一 人は「福島での検査体制を視察し安全性を確信できた。タイでは日本の商品への信頼度が高い。おいしいモモな ので、よりアピールしてたくさん売りたい」と意欲を語った。

The group of Thai buyers visited the prefectural government office on August 9, and was briefed on the situation of testing for radioactive materials and on the characteristics of the taste [of the peaches]. One of the buyers was eager to sell the peaches in Thailand, saying "I'm convinced of the safety after seeing the testing process in Fukushima. People in Thailand trust goods made in Japan. Peaches are delicious, and I'm looking forward to promoting and selling a lot of them."

バイヤーらは８日、伊達市の果樹園や郡山市の百貨店、県農業総合センターを訪れ、販売現場の様子や放射能問 題への取り組みに理解を深めた。

On August 8, the buyers had visited an orchard in Date City, a department store in Koriyama City, and the prefectural agricultural experiment station. They observed how [the peaches] were sold, and how the testing for radioactive materials was done.

原発事故後、中国、韓国、台湾など東アジア各国は県産品の輸入を停止している。タイは震災前、県産のモモを 輸入していた。

After the Fukushima nuclear accident, East Asian countries including China, Korea and Taiwan have stopped importing the produce from Fukushima Prefecture. Before the March 11, 2011 disaster, Thailand had been importing the peaches from Fukushima.

ex-skf.blogspot.com.au

robuzo

Normally they priced for the local J-community, which won't want them if they are accurately labeled, so if the price is low enough to appeal to Thais we'll know they are just being dumped.

Probably beside the point, but I'm not sure how much more toxic fruit from at least the western part of Fukushima Pref (the western part of the prefecture suffered very little exposure) would be than apples and other produce from China- my guess would be probably less when it comes to pesticides.

ENT

Any product from Fukushima is going to be contaminated by radioactivity.

The "safe" level of contamination is an estimate determined by scientists. It does not mean that testing is done according to strict guidelines. Take the case of ground level tests for radiation at the Daiichi plant, where clean top soil was used to replace contaminated soil. then tests taken to "prove" that radiation levels were within acceptable limits.

There are no contamination free products in Fukushima or its environs.

I also think that greedy Thai businessmen will buy the peaches cheap as they'd otherwise be dumped.

The Japs don't want them, they know the peaches are contaminated, and they know that their government is lying to them.

Mid

US sailors sue Japanese utility over radiation
Dec 29, 2012

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Eight U.S. sailors are suing the Tokyo utility that operates the Fukushima nuclear power plant, charging that the company lied about the high level of radiation in the area where they were carrying out a humanitarian mission after the tsunami that triggered the reactor crisis.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego last week against Tokyo Electric Power Co., which is owned by the Japanese government. Plaintiffs include the infant daughter of two of the sailors who was born seven months after the March 2011 disaster.

The sailors served on the San Diego-based aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, which was carrying out “Operation Tomadachi” ferrying food and water to citizens in the city of Sendai in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami.


The Fukushima power plant seen before the devastating tsunami struck. Pic: AP.

The sailors claim the Japanese government repeatedly said there was no danger to the carrier crew “all the while lying through their teeth about the reactor meltdowns” so rescuers would “rush into an unsafe area.”

The U.S. Navy, the suit said, relied on information from the Japanese government, which only belatedly admitted that radiation had leaked into the atmosphere from the damaged power plant.

An email seeking response from the utility’s corporate office in Tokyo was not immediately returned.

The 37-page suit, which cites numerous reports about the Fukushima crisis and response, said that after discovering the truth of how much radiation they were exposed to, the sailors have undergone extensive medical testing and will be required to undergo periodic examination in the future.

They say they are at risk for developing cancer and a shorter life expectancy, and are undergoing considerable mental anguish as a result.

The sailors are suing for more than $100 million in damages.

asiancorrespondent.com

taxexile

So the American army dont carry their own geiger counters when entering a potential radioactive zone.

They should be suing their own government.

quimbian corholla

It's Navy

Isn't a potentially shorter life expectancy kind of one of the occupational hazards of being in the military?

Mid

Increased obesity rates among Fukushima kids
Graham Land
Dec 29, 2012

Nearly two years after an earthquake and tsunami resulted in the second worst nuclear accident in history, Fukushima is still grabbing headlines around the world. Meanwhile, local residents are still suffering from the aftermath.

A nationwide health survey of Japan’s school children has revealed that Fukushima prefecture has the highest rates of obesity for kids aged 5-9 and the second highest for those aged 10 and 11. A local official for Fukushima’s board of education ascribes this downturn in health to the disruption in the lives of the children resulting from the disaster. Children housed in shelters have suffered more stress and had less opportunities to play outside, meaning they haven’t gotten enough exercise. Half of the primary schools in the prefecture also limited outdoor play due to concerns about radiation.

From The Daily Yomiuri:

In comparison with figures from the 2010 academic year, the prefecture’s rate of 6-year-old obese boys increased to 11.4 percent, the highest observed, from 6.2 percent, or ninth place just two years ago. The age group containing 8-year-old girls in the prefecture also showed the highest obesity rates, standing at 14.61 percent–nearly double the 8.1 percent recorded in 2010, or 17th in the rankings.

Obese children are defined as weighing 20 percent more than “standard” weights according to age and height. Five-year-olds in Fukushima had more than double the rates of the national average, according to the Asahi Shimbun. The paper also states that the obesity rates of 14 and 17-year-olds in Fukushima are the highest in Japan.


Fukushima Clean-Up,
pic: Hajime Nakano (Flickr CC)

In a related story, Fukushima victims have banded together to state their grievances with the Japanese government in the form of a non-binding human rights declaration. Many residents feel that they have been treated unfairly and denied information. Many also continue to feel unsafe.
From the declaration, as quoted in the Asahi Shimbun:

We want Fukushima to return to the way it was, where we can eat tasty rice, vegetables, fruit, fish and meat without the slightest fear.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, California residents have been spotting “Fukushima debris”. There have been around 1,400 sightings reported to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but only 17 pieces of debris have actually been traced by the NOAA. News reports of a football and a crate containing a motorcycle (both found in Canada) have fueled a bit of tsunami debris fever in the Golden State, alongside some fears of contamination.

Read more on that story in Russia Today.

asiancorrespondent.com

Mid

Japan’s ‘Long War’ to Shut Down Fukushima
KIYOSHI TAKENAKA and JAMES TOPHAM
Writing and additional reporting by Linda Sieg and Aaron Sheldrick; additional reporting by Maki Shiraki
March 6, 2013


Workers wait for transportation to the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant at J-Village near the plant in Fukushima Prefecture. (Photo: Reuters)

TOKYO — Just months after Quince was deployed to inspect Japan’s tsunami-devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the $6 million robot got trapped in its dark and winding pathways.

Seventeen months later, the high-tech soldier is still missing in action—a symbol of a daunting decommissioning project that will take decades, require huge injections of human and financial capital and rely on yet-to-be developed technologies.

“It’s like going to war with bamboo sticks,” said Takuya Hattori, president of the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum and a 36-year veteran of Fukushima plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co, known as Tepco.

The war began after a massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck northeast Japan on March 11, 2011, triggering a huge tsunami. Walls of water 13 meters (43 feet) high smashed into the Fukushima plant north of Tokyo, knocking out its main power supply, destroying backup generators and disabling the cooling system. Three reactors melted down as a series of hydrogen explosions rocked the plant.

In the ensuing weeks, hundreds of Japanese workers and soldiers battled to contain the crisis. Their arsenal of weapons was often improvised, low-tech and underpowered. Helicopters dumped buckets of water over the plant to cool it. Electricians laid a cable to connect the plant to a power source miles away in what may have been the world’s longest extension cord.

The world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl a quarter century earlier called into question Japan’s vaunted reputation for bureaucratic competence and leading edge technology.

The reactors were declared to be in a stable state called cold-shut down in December 2011. But now Japan faces an unprecedented clean-up that experts say could cost at least $100 billion for decommissioning the reactors and another $400 billion for compensating victims and decontaminating areas outside the plant.

Tepco said in November the costs of compensation to residents and decontamination of their neighborhoods might double to 10 trillion yen ($107 billion) from a previous estimate. That did not include a forecast for decommissioning.

Two years after the disaster, cleanup of communities around the plant is haphazard. Much of the work has been handed to Japanese construction companies with little relevant experience. Townships around the plant say the cleanup is behind schedule, while contaminated dirt, leaves and rubble removed by cleaning crews pile up all over Fukushima with no government decision in sight over its final storage space.

The Japan Center for Economic Research, a Tokyo-based think tank, has estimated that decontamination costs alone in the Fukushima residential area could balloon to as much as $600 billion.

Shutting down the 40-year-old Fukushima plant itself poses unique challenges. A Tepco-government roadmap envisages starting to extract spent fuel from the most badly damaged of the station’s seven storage pools, which contain 11,417 new and used fuel assemblies, only later this year. Melted fuel debris is to be removed from the reactors from 2021 and the entire project wrapped up within 30 to 40 years.

Officials say the project is mostly on schedule and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government wants to speed up the timetable. Experts, however, say it may already be too ambitious.

“It’s a pipe dream,” Michio Ishikawa said of the four-decade target shortly before he retired last year as chief adviser at the Japan Nuclear Technology Institute, adding it could take decades more.

Reuters reporters visited the plant three times since February 2012 and interviewed dozens of experts, officials, engineers, workers and industry executives to compile the first comprehensive report on the decommissioning project.

Many of those interviewed expressed serious concerns about a lack of vital technology, a potential labour shortage and the vast amount of funds Japan’s heavily indebted government will need to spend.

At the leafy campus of Chiba Institute of Technology’s Future Robotics Technology Center east of Tokyo—nerve center for Fukushima robotics projects—students and engineers are working flat out to create machines to go where none has gone before.

Some nap on make-shift beds surrounded by robot parts at the Center’s airy loft-like building while others slurp noodles as they stare at computer screens or fiddle with smartphones.

A slim 20-something research scientist uses a simple joystick to make an advanced version of the lost Quince robot climb stairs, turn around in a narrow landing, and descend.

Quince was first deployed in June 2011 and was carrying out a survey of one of the reactors when the operators lost contact with the machine later that October. Attempts to retrieve the robot have failed, though developers conjecture one day they will find Quince and it could give them valuable information about the effects of prolonged radiation on electronics.

The new version, called “Sakura” or Cherry Blossom, can navigate narrower spaces and, unlike its predecessor, plug into a battery charging station on its own.

Technology, however, must still be developed to accomplish even the most basic first step—the ability to find and repair leaks in the reactors and fill them with water to shield human workers from high radiation emitted by the debris.

“It’s like the fog of war,” said John Raymont, president of US-based Kurion Inc, which supplied a water treatment system briefly used to filter contaminated water at the plant. “They are only now getting to know what the problem looks like.”

So far, Tepco has only managed to insert remote controlled cameras, similar to endoscopes, into outer vessels of the reactors. The effort has obtained little useful data on the fuel debris, a vital first step before technology to remove it can be developed.

One potential device being considered is a fish-like swimming robot that would glide inside the doughnut-shaped suppression chambers filled with water to create detailed maps.

A key reason for the belated effort to develop such technology was Japan’s reluctance to acknowledge the possibility of atomic disasters. Doing so would have contradicted a decades-old myth of nuclear safety. Robots developed after a 1999 nuclear accident at Tokaimura near Tokyo ended up in science museums after research was abandoned.

“The government didn’t spend more money after that to develop robots. That’s because people were obviously going to ask, ‘Wait, is there going to be a situation so dangerous that humans can’t enter the plant?’,” said Eiji Koyanagi, vice director of the Future Robotics Technology Center.

The first robots into the plant were US-made Packbots, which were deployed just after the disaster to enter areas heavy with radiation.

Tepco’s most immediate challenge is to remove spent fuel from pools at the plant, starting with reactor No.4, where more than 1,500 rods rest inside a pool that was exposed to the atmosphere after an explosion blew off the top of the unit’s building.

Debris from the top of the reactor building, where radiation levels are too high for humans, has had to be removed painstakingly using cranes and other lifting equipment to get to the spent fuel pool.

That project has a special sense of urgency given concerns another big quake could further damage the building, although Tepco says the structure was reinforced to withstand shaking as intense as in the March 2011 quake.

Another fraught task is to treat and store the contaminated water that results from cooling the reactors to keep them in a stable state at below 100 degrees Celsius. The contaminated water is flooding reactor building basements and threatening to seep into the ocean and groundwater.

Fukushima Daiichi plant sits like a carbuncle on Japan’s northeast coast 240 km (150 miles) from Tokyo. Its damaged reactors still seep radiation, although at a rate of 10 million Becquerel per hour for cesium versus about 800 trillion right after the disaster.

Becquerel per hour measures the amount of radiation emitted or the rate of radioactive decay. As atomic isotopes decay, they spin off energized particles that can penetrate human organs and damage human cells, potentially causing cancer. To minimize the dangers to human health from radiation, the government is enforcing a 20-km no-go zone around the plant.

Every day the roughly 3,000 workers who will enter the plant assemble at a base camp—a former sports complex called J-Village—on the edge of the exclusion zone.

There, they don full-body protective suits, rubber gloves and plastic shoe guards. Once at the plant, they put on face masks to keep from inhaling radioactive particles.

Front-line workers, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, complain about working in the stifling protective gear, the relatively low pay, loneliness—and stress.

About 70 percent of a sample of workers surveyed by Tepco late last year made more than 837 yen ($9) per hour, while a day laborer in that part of Japan can earn as much as 1,500 yen per hour.

Wages are lower than those offered locally for other jobs requiring similar skills, including decontaminating and rebuilding areas further from the plant, said Junji Annen, a professor at Chuo University who last year chaired a panel on Tepco’s finances.

“The money is getting worse and worse, and who would want to come and work under these conditions?” a heavy machinery operator in his 40s said as he unwound in the Ai Yakitori bar in Hirono, a town about 40 km from the plant, where dormitories have sprouted up for workers.

“I get stomachaches. I am constantly stressed. When I’m back in my room, all I can do is worry about the next day,” added the worker, employed by a small subcontractor. “They should give us a medal.”

Mental health experts compare the stress to that suffered by soldiers at a battle front. Moreover, public outrage at Tepco has spilled over into attitudes toward workers.

“Tepco workers are at risk of following in the steps of Vietnam veterans, many of whom were rejected by society on their return, became homeless, committed suicide or got addicted to alcohol and drugs,” said Jun Shigemura, a lecturer in the psychiatry department of the National Defense Medical College who conducted a survey of 1,500 Tepco nuclear workers.

The decommissioning plan says authorities can supply enough workers through the decades ahead, but signs of potential shortages are evident, partly because workers are “burning out” by reaching their radiation limits.

As of the end of December 2012, 146 Tepco workers and 21 contract workers had exceeded the maximum permissible exposure of 100 millisieverts in five years, Tepco data showed.

Eight workers have died at the plant, including two on the day of the tsunami. None of the deaths were caused by radiation.

The industry faces a shortage of nuclear engineers as well as blue-collar workers in the decommissioning work for both Fukushima Daiichi and other ageing reactors.

Abe’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party-led government has scrapped its predecessor’s plan to exit atomic energy by the 2030s but has yet to map out an alternative energy program. Public safety concerns persist—a recent poll showed 70 percent want to abandon atomic power sooner or later—clouding the industry outlook.

For example, at the University of Tokyo, applications for advanced nuclear engineering degrees fell about 30 percent for the year from April from the previous year and Tokyo City University saw a similar decline in applicants for its undergraduate nuclear engineering program in the academic year starting in April 2012 from 2010.

“Who will clear up the mess after the accident? It will be young people like us,” said Yuta Shindo, a 25-year-old master’s student at Tokyo City’s nuclear engineering department. “We are the ones who will be working on this decades from now.”

Cleaning up the mess will mean total demolition of the four damaged reactor facilities and disposal of the nuclear waste in a yet-to-be determined site, an end-game likely to face opposition from potential host communities.

Japan has rejected the “sarcophagus” option used at Chernobyl, where the damaged reactor was encased in a massive concrete envelope. This is partly because of the difficulty of monitoring an entombed facility to ensure safety, said Kentaro Funaki, director of the industry ministry’s office in charge of decommissioning.

Estimates for total costs are mostly guesswork. “Only God knows,” said Chuo University’s Annen.

Whatever the final bill, Japanese consumers are likely to end up paying much of it, either through taxes, higher electricity rates or both, even as Japan’s government struggles with massive public debt and the costs of an ageing population.

That may be unpopular but also inevitable.

“This kind of job has never been done,” said Keiro Kitagami, a former lawmaker who headed a government task force overseeing R&D for the project. “The technology, the wherewithal, has never been developed. Basically, we are groping in the dark.”

irrawaddy.org

robuzo

"A Tepco-government roadmap envisages starting to extract spent fuel from the most badly damaged of the station’s seven storage pools, which contain 11,417 new and used fuel assemblies, only later this year."

Even that is ambitious considering they have accomplished practically nothing in this aspect of the cleanup, which is the most critical. So long as there are no more major quakes in the area and/or no tsunami, no problem.

Mid

US military members suing over Japan nuke disaster
15 Mar 2013

US service members are suing the Tokyo Electric Power Co. for more than $2 billion on grounds the utility lied about the dangers of helping clean up the nuclear disaster that struck two years ago, a newspaper reported Thursday.


A police officer searches for missing people near the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant on March 11, 2013. US service members are suing the Tokyo Electric Power Co. for more than $2 billion on grounds the utility lied about the dangers of helping clean up the nuclear disaster that struck two years ago, a newspaper reported Thursday.

The case was first filed by nine plaintiffs in December but has now expanded to 26, and another 100 are in the process of joining the suit, said Stars and Strips newspaper.

The new complaint was filed Tuesday in US District Court in California, a day after the two year anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that hit the eastern coast of Japan. It left nearly 15,881 people dead and 2,668 others still unaccounted for.

The plaintiffs include active duty and retired shore-based Marines, shore-based dependents and sailors from ships that operated in the disaster area.

The newspaper said peers of the plaintiffs complain the latter are seeking an easy payoff and that the Pentagon insists the radiation they were exposed to did not pose a major health risk.

The plaintiffs says the have suffered a number of ailments that they say are linked to their exposure, including headaches, difficulty concentrating, rectal bleeding, thyroid problems, cancer, tumors and gynecological bleeding.

bangkokpost.com

robuzo

(OK, rat eating TEPCO, that's just wishful thinking, but. . .) A rodent may have caused a power failure that put all Fukushima NPP cooling systems out of action. Power has now been restored at the plant as Japan returns to the use of nuclear power halted after the 2011 disaster: One step from meltdown: Rat may have caused dangerous outage at Fukushima NPP ? RT News

Mid

A sort of shellfish disappears in Japan
April 1, 2013

Japanese researchers announced recently that a sort of shellfish called Thais clavigera disappeared in a 30-km coastal area near Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Researchers from Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies and National Institute of Radiological Sciences conducted the study last April on shellfish's living status in 43 places from Japan's Chiba to Iwate Prefectures for four months.

The team found that the Thais clavigera was extinct in eight of ten places within the 20-km-radius alert zone of the nuclear plant, which was damaged by tsunami in March 2011 and triggered the world' s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

Other shellfish species, such as Cellana grata, were found in the alert zone but the amount of them declined, with high dose of radioactive materials inside their bodies, according to the researchers.

Thais clavigera, a kind of shell that widely lives across Japan, was found in most places that had been surveyed, including 25 of 33 places outside the alert zone, said the researchers.

Toshihiro Horiguchi, a researcher from the environmental institute and the head of the team, said that it is a rare occurrence that Thais clavigera entirely disappeared from a 30-km long area, adding the extinct was probably caused by the nuclear crisis.

The link between the disappearance and the catastrophic tsunami was excluded as the shell was also found in other areas that affected by the disaster, according to the team.

The researchers made the report in an annual meeting of the Japanese Society of Fisheries Science last Wednesday and will further study links between the extinct and nuclear crisis.

china.org.cn

Mid

New radioactive leak at Fukushima
Sunday, April 07, 2013

Some radioactive water may have leaked into the ground from a storage tank at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, its operator says, the latest in a series of troubles at the facility.

The fresh leak comes a day after Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said up to 120 tonnes of contaminated water may have escaped from another of the seven underground reservoir tanks at the tsunami-damaged plant.

But it said the contaminated water was unlikely to flow into the sea.

The tanks store water used to cool down the reactors after radioactive caesium is removed but other radioactive substances remain.

TEPCO said radioactivity was detected in water outside a tank in the latest leak.

'We have determined that a minimal amount of water was feared to have leaked from the tank although there was no decline in the level of water inside the tank,' it said in a statement

The series of leakages came after one of the systems keeping spent atomic fuel cool at the plant temporarily failed on Friday, the second outage in a matter of weeks, underlining the precarious fix at the plant.

Nuclear fuel, even after use, has to be kept cool to prevent it from overheating and beginning a self-sustaining atomic reaction that could lead to meltdown.

The plant was hit by the giant tsunami of March 2011 as reactors went into meltdown and spewed radiation over a wide area, forcing tens of thousands of people from their homes and polluting farmland.

bigpondnews.com