Fukushima Update

Green Action Press Release

For immediate release
Contact: Aileen Mioko Smith +81-90-3620-9251

150,000 people remain displaced as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident which began on 11 March 2011, and the reality of this nuclear disaster is still reported daily in the news. In spite of this, on January 30th, the new Shinzo Abe administration announced that it would scrap the former government’s plans to phase out nuclear power during the 2030’s, and would deliberate on the issue “from scratch,” completely negating the public debate undertaken by the national government last summer.[1] The current national government must listen to the will of the Japanese people.

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March 10, 2013
Bloomberg Businessweek
By Jason Clenfield

Every morning, 3,000 cleanup workers at the Fukushima disaster site don hooded hazard suits, air-filtered face masks and multiple glove layers. Most of the gear is radioactive waste by day’s end.

Multiply those cast-offs by the 730 days since a tsunami wrecked the Dai-Ichi nuclear station two years ago and the trash could fill six Olympic swimming pools. The tens of thousands of waste bags stored in shielded containers illustrate the dilemma of dealing with a nuclear accident: Everything that touches it becomes toxic.

Contaminated clothing represents just a fraction of the waste facing Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501) in a cleanup that may take four decades. A tour of the plant last week went past rows of grey and blue tanks holding enough irradiated water to fill 100 Olympic pools on the plateau overlooking Dai-Ichi’s four ruined reactors. And the water keeps coming.

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March 9, 2013
The Lancet
By Justin McCurry

March 11 will mark the 2 year anniversary of the triple disaster that struck Japan’s northeast coast. Justin McCurry visited Fukushima this month and reports on how the region is faring.

Next week marks 2 years since a magnitude-9·0 earthquake struck northeast Japan, triggering a tsunami that destroyed a vast stretch of coastline and sparking a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Reconstruction of the towns and villages worst hit by the tsunami has barely begun; hundreds of thousands of survivors languish in temporary housing, uncertain of where, or when, their vanished hometowns will be rebuilt. In Fukushima, an estimated 160 000 people who lived within 20 km of the ruined power plant continue to live in a state of limbo.

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March 8, 2013
Reuters
By Mari Saito, Kiyoshi Takenaka and James Topham

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.

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March 8, 2013
The Star Online
By Mari Saito and Linda Sieg

The crowds of anti-nuclear protesters have dwindled since Japan’s “Summer of Discontent” last year, and a new government is keen to revive the country’s atomic energy industry, but Morishi Izumita says he is not about to throw in the towel.

“We can’t give up. I’m here every week,” said 64-year-old Izumita, one of hundreds gathered outside the prime minister’s office one Friday nearly two years after a huge earthquake and tsunami triggered the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986 at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant.

“We need to be out here protesting. Not giving up is the important thing,” he added, as other activists banged on drums and chanted “Stop nuclear power, protect our children”.

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March 6, 2013
The Telegraph
By Julian Ryall

Two years on from the second-worst nuclear disaster in history, The Telegraph’s Julian Ryall visits the Fukushima nuclear plant to see what progress – if any – is being made.

Radiation levels within three of the reactor buildings at the Fukushima Nuclear plant in Japan are still too high for people to start decommissioning the reactors, two years on from the second-worst nuclear disaster in history.

Scientists still do not have a firm understanding of the precise conditions of the reactor cores in three of the six units at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and are resorting to using remote-controlled vehicles to get inside the tangle of wires, pipes and rubbles that has lain untouched since the tsunami tore through the facility.

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March 6, 2013
TMCNET.com
By David Delony

Google has started mapping the nuclear exclusion zone in Japan, two years after an earthquake and subsequent tsunami – and radiation leaks from a damaged nuclear reactor – devastated the country.

“There’s nothing that compares to actually coming in and seeing [the damage] for yourself,” Kei Kawai, a Google product manager, told ABC News. “But we can at least show what these places are like, to the people who [evacuated] the city, to the world.”

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February 24, 2013
The Asahi Shimbun

None of Japan’s 16 nuclear power plants has satisfied the government’s proposed new safety standards, making them ineligible to be restarted in the near future, according to an Asahi Shimbun survey.

For nine of the plants, operators even said they cannot tell when they can meet the new requirements being drafted by the Nuclear Regulation Authority.

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March 8, 2013

CCTV – NuclearFree from Fairewinds Energy Education on Vimeo.

Arnie joins CCTV’s host Margaret Harrington and special guest Mark Pendergrast, author of “Japan’s Tipping Point” to talk about Fukushima Daiichi’s second anniversary and the impact it is having on the public view of renewable energy.

Original Source

March 2, 2013
Kyodo News

A high concentration of radioactive cesium has been found in a range of land animals and insects in areas around the site of the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, providing a clue to a mechanism of radioactivity accumulation in the food chain, a study showed Saturday.

According to a survey by the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology and Hokkaido University, over 6,700 becquerels per kilogram of cesium 137 was detected in a frog captured in Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, some 40 kilometers west of the crippled nuclear plant.

The finding suggests animals positioned relatively high in the food chain tend to accumulate more radioactive materials, the research team said.

Original Source

February 22, 2013
The Mainichi

Radioactive material from the damaged Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant spread to residential areas hours before workers vented the containment vessel of the plant’s No. 1 reactor on March 12, 2011, to release pressure, it has emerged.

In one area, the level of radiation had surged to more than 700 times the normal level, indicating that many local residents were exposed to high levels of radiation before they evacuated.

The Fukushima Prefectural Government operated 25 monitoring posts around the nuclear power plant before it was crippled by the March 11, 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. Five monitoring posts were swept away by the tsunami, and 20 couldn’t send data because the quake caused power cuts. Accordingly, officials were unable to put the data to use when evacuating residents.

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