i'm not sure how many people are following the events at Fukushima - the news seems to be mostly covert and deliberatley kept quiet, however every day it gets worse, plutonium has been exploded all over the place (the most deadly substance known to man), the no 1 reactor is likely cracked or melted through by melted fuel rods, the water table is contaminated, the sea is contaminated, the USA is being contaminated, the other reactors are not doing well, and the poor old workers have had their limits raised and doubled twice, and are all likely to die form exposure. Materials are being turned back at European ports because of contamination, the news goes on and on - dreadful - my heart goes out to these quiet people who have to live in these conditions.
I can't see the video's on there (work computer won't let me), and I'm not discrediting Mr Gundersen's expertise, but it is his personal business website and the comments under the video's do make it sound as though the content will be his own analysis and opinion of things.
There are other sites such as the register that highlight the scaremongering that's also going on...
What about reported scientific studies/facts?
I would have thought if there were any hint of anything bigger than what we already know, being brought to light as factual evidence, the BBC and other more reliable newspapers would have been reporting on it.
I'm not saying that facts aren't hidden from the public, but in this day and age of communication, it's nigh on impossible to keep secret, especially if it's not behind closed doors; and let's face it, that nuclear disaster area is open enough for anybody with facts to get that information out about it.
Thanks for highlighting that fairewinds site. I've been following the Japan nuclear crisis quite closely as my brother-in-law lives and works in Japan. He lives in Hiroshima which is a long way away from the Daiichi plant but I have still been worrying that the situation was deteriorating and might even get to affect him and his wife.
The info coming out of Japan just didn't all add up to me but the explanations provided by Arnie G in that fairwinds link make proper sense to me. It seems to me that 'Japan' has been releasing the bad news about the plant bit by bit in retrospect, but at the same time mitigating it with snippets of good bits of progress being made.
Am sending Reiki for a positive solution and to alleviate all the suffering the Japanese have had to endure thus far.
It's a terrible tragedy of course. But it's when I got to the bit in your post about "the USA is being contaminated" that I did have to think, "Hang on a minute....." TBH. America's a long way away.... Then one starts to think, yes, of a degree of scaremongering.
Well, I wouldn't say that it's necessarily untrue. With tidal currents etc. there's certainly a possibility of the American continent receiving some level of contamination.
My concern was that Chris' original post came across as though something new and major had happened, so I went looking on the BBC news etc. but found nothing other than what had already been reported. Yes it has gone quiet on the news front in relation to it, but from those journalistic sources it would seem that the crisis is just in a state of continually being dealt with and is 'under control' as well as can be. That doesn't preclude the possibility of continuing contamination, just that there's no indication of a worsening situation. One would have thought that the slightest sniff of anything worsening would cause the media to jump on it for their front pages etc.
As I say, Mr Gundersen is obviously an expert in the area, but just basing it on what he says on his business website, could also been looked at as though he has a vested interest in making things seem worse, in order to make himself seem better. I can't find any other trusted source to verify the details, just lots of conspiracy type website stuff.
MoonF, I hope your bother in law and family are ok.
Hi venetian,
Yes - but the winds carry Iodine and caesium, these are alrwady being detected.
Hi Giles,
todays news, extending the exclsion zones, and leakages in the corse from fule melting are reported here - if you beleive the BBC that is....
Hi moonfairy,
Yes - desperate measures, mainly to hide things I suspect.
Remember when chernobyl was on - the governmemts all told us it was safe, no need to worry, only a few cancers resulting etc, only now do we find out the true numbers. The Japanese are no different, they have already said that they lied to stop panic, nothing has changed.
They now seem to be admitting that at least 3 of the reactors have suffered almost complete meltdowns - certainly in the case of Reactor 1 the melted fuel has melted holes in the reactor vessel.
This means in real terms that these can never be brought to a cold shutdown, as this involves complete fuel rods. The alternative, used by chernobyl, was to encase the whole in concrete - this is not possible in fukushima because there is already leakage into the groundwater, the concrete will not stop this.
They are importing a huge barge to hold more radioactive water, the waste just grows and grows, it will eventually be discharged, they claim to be preparing to treat and recycle it, but it has never been done on this scale by a long chalk.
Video in at least one of the spent fuel pools shows no rods left - they have gone somewhere but it is not clear where.
It is now nine weeks since the tsunami, there has been no improvement in the situation, the exclusion zone has been extended and greenpeace (denied access to test for radioactivity) says that seaweed being harvested for human consumption is badly contaminated.
Building 4 is leaning badly and may collapse at any moment - if it does it makes the situation a lot worse.
The workers are near the twice extended limits, and yet the environment is so high in radioactivity that they can only spend 10 minutes at a time there, childrens limits are now legally set as high as nuclear workers are allowed in other counties.
This still has a long way to go.
Some people on this thread seem to regard the BBC as an unfailingly reliable source. I'm afraid I no longer believe that. Generally the BBC radio news only seems to focus on one topic at a time, whether its Libya, Syria, Fukushima or the Royal Wedding. There is very little analysis, mostly just tabloid-style reporting of "how people feel", which given the typical reticence of the Japanese about their own feelings, doesn't leave the media with much to say.
As regards reliability of Japanese government statements, I wouldn't put much value on these. From what I've heard, people educated in Japanese state schools are for instance largely unaware that their army committed atrocities in World War Two. My impression is that if news of Fukushima would cause a loss of face for Japan, then it will be suppressed if possible.
"There is a cultural element in this. The Japanese do not want to be embarrassed". He added that TEPCO is a large entity which only has to answer to the Prime Minister. He added that it is a bit of the "... Only small people pay taxes mentality". The mass media in Japan is only given the information TEPCO and the government want to give them.
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.......the number of homes in the villages which are contaminated, the rice paddies, the fact that the "official" six to nine month cleanup is virtually impossible, no matter how much they do accomplish... all of this is what has being kept off the front pages of the mass media.
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......there is no initiative taking place in terms of the health and measuring of those who have been exposed. The IAEA is supposedly sending around 20 experts to help with this, but even they do not have the kind of manpower to deal with such a human catastrophe (yet, Tokuhiro adds, they can find people to go to Iran and Iraq as weapons inspectors).
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Virtually any nuclear engineer connected with the industry he or she supports cannot be fully trusted right now to give us the full truth about Fukushima because the truth is simply too damaging to the nuclear industry and they know it.
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Why is TEPCO not telling anyone the truth? That these 3 units have partially melted and that they have known this for 3-4 weeks at least. They release only small amounts of information every day. Many nuclear engineering professionals have known, were able to figure out almost from the beginning, in fact perhaps from March 15, sixteen hours or so after the accident, that the core had melted.
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Fukushima differs from other nuclear reactors in that it uses a dirty fuel or MOX which is banned in many of the countries where nuclear power is a major energy source.
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...what happened to the plutonium stored in the water tanks next to the reactor.
This statement has relevance -
The steep drop in Tepco’s stock price has already dealt a blow to investment funds in the United States.
and if this correct then the ship was contaminated out at sea....
Five shipping containers detained in Rotterdam after testing positive for radiation probably left Japan before a screening program started, the Asian nation’s transport ministry said.
"Tepco was working on the assumption that some fuel from Fukushima Daiichi’s No 1 reactor core had leaked out. On Monday Haruki Madarame, chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, said: “Our understanding is that the No 2 reactor melted down. We surmise that the No 3 reactor is in the same situation.”
And now some reports that the No 1 containment vessel may have been breached by the meltdown, the fuel is free......
and if you can spare 13 minutes this is a very interesting video of the site - the blue stuff is the plastic they sprayed to keep down the radioactive dust.
And in a significant miscalculation: At first, engineers weren't aware that the plant's emergency batteries were barely working, the investigation found—giving them a false impression that they had more time to make repairs. As a result, nuclear fuel began melting down hours earlier than previously assumed. This week Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, confirmed that one of the plant's six reactors suffered a substantial meltdown early in Day 1.
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Soon after the quake, but before the tsunami struck, workers at one reactor actually shut down valves in a backup cooling system—one that, critically, didn't rely on electrical power to keep functioning—thinking it wasn't essential. That decision likely contributed to the rapid meltdown of nuclear fuel, experts say.
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Tepco executives have acknowledged they weren't aware for hours of the severity of the crisis. By the time Tepco decided to vent its reactor, radiation levels were so high that the man who volunteered to hand-crank the relief valve open was exposed, in a few minutes, to 100 times the radiation an average person gets in a year.
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Government officials now say it took Tepco so long to decide to vent because the radiation release would sharply elevate the accident's severity. They say Tepco still hoped the accident could be contained without venting, given that release of radioactivity in the atmosphere would instantly rank Fukushima among the world's worst accidents, along with Chernobyl.
...............................
I know there is some media censorship going on because I was reading a very interesting article on another site the other night and bookmarked it to re-read thoroughly the next day and found the page annoyingly had been taken down.
The operator of the damaged nuclear power plant in Fukushima has reported a sharp rise in the concentration of a radioactive material in samples of seawater near the Number 3 reactor.
News is also released that a Japanese firm has shown media a newly developed a special forklift with a radiation-proof cabin
'.......... an operator in the radiation-proofed cabin can drive the new forklifts, closely monitoring the plant compound and this can speed up the work to dispose of the debris.'
Though it doesn't actually say when it will start being used.
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