[click image]Sliming penguins....
Doomed dairy....
Goldstone gives in....
BP drilling in the Gulf....
The war drones on as though it's stopping tomorrow....
Polymer didn't work....
Information that will not land on your synapses....
Worse than Dubya....
Corbett Report....
The banks....
UNSPEAKABLE....
Fidel....
For Phil....
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Fukushima nuclear complex has been found to have radioactive water leaking into the sea from a cracked concrete pit.
In a discovery regulators said might explain the radioactive water that has hobbled efforts to quell Japan's nuclear crisis, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said the radiation in the pit at its No.2 reactor in Fukushima measured 1,000 millisieverts per hour.
"With radiation levels rising in the seawater near the plant, we have been trying to confirm the reason why, and in that context, this could be one source," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy head of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
He cautioned, however, "We can't really say for certain until we've studied the results."
TEPCO is preparing to pour concrete into the pit to stop the leak, added Nishiyama.
[click image]And in any case, this external irradiation is not the problem. The problem is internal irradiation. The Iodine-131 is not in the whole body, it is in the thyroid gland and attached to the blood cells: hence the thyroid cancer and the leukaemia. And there is a whole list of internal radioactive elements that bind chemically to DNA, from Strontium-90 to Uranium. These give massive local doses to the DNA and to the tissues where they end up. The human body is not a piece of wire that you can apply physics to. The concept of dose which Wade uses cannot be used for internal exposures. This has been conceded by the ICRP itself in its publications. And in an interview with me in Stockholm in 2009, Dr Jack Valentin, the ex-Scientific Secretary of the ICRP conceded this, and also made the statement that the ICRP risk model, the one used by all governments to assess the outcome of accidents like Fukushima, was unsafe and could not be used.
[click image]Fukushima is going to dwarf Chenobyl. The Japanese government has had a level 7 nuclear disaster going for almost a week but won’t admit it.
The disaster is occurring the opposite way than Chernobyl, which exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactions are getting worse. I suspect three nuclear piles are in meltdown and we will probably get some of it.
If reactor 3 is in meltdown, the concrete under the containment looks like lava. But Fukushima is not far off the water table. When that molten mass of self-sustaining nuclear material gets to the water table it won’t simply cool down. It will explode – not a nuclear explosion, but probably enough to involve the rest of the reactors and fuel rods at the facility.
Pouring concrete on a critical reactor makes no sense – it will simply explode and release more radioactive particulate matter. The concrete will melt and the problem will get worse. Chernobyl was different – a critical reactor exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactor cores are still melting down. The ONLY way to stop that is to detonate a ~10 kiloton fission device inside each reactor containment vessel and hope to vaporize the cores. That’s probably a bad solution.
A nuclear meltdown is a self-sustaining reaction. Nothing can stop it except stopping the reaction. And that would require a nuclear weapon. In fact, it would require one in each containment vessel to merely stop what is going on now. But it will be messy.
Fukushima was waiting to happen because of the placement of the emergency generators. If they had not all failed at once by being inundated by a tsunami, Fukushima would not have happened as it did – although it WOULD still have been a nuclear disaster. Every containment in the world is built to withstand a Magnitude 6.9 earthquake; the Japanese chose to ignore the fact that a similar earthquake had hit that same general area in 1896.
Anyway, here is the information that the US doesn’t seem to want released. And here is a chart that might help with perspective.
Making matters worse is the MOX in reactor 3. MOX is the street name for ‘mixed oxide fuel’ which uses ~9% plutonium along with a uranium compound to fuel reactors. This is why it can be used.
The problem is that you don’t want to play with this stuff. A nuclear reactor means bring fissile material to a point at which it is hot enough to boil water (in a light-water reactor) and not enough to melt and go supercritical (China syndrome or a Chernobyl incident). You simply cannot let it get away from you because if it does, you can’t stop it.
The Japanese are still talking about days or weeks to clean this up. That’s not true. They cannot clean it up. And no one will live in that area again for dozens or maybe hundreds of years.
[click image]There is no health risk from consuming milk with extremely low levels of radiation, like those found in Washington state and California, experts said Thursday, echoing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
"When we have a disaster like we've had with a nuclear power plant in Japan, we're probably going to find things that are truly not a public health risk [right along with those that truly are], but I think it's very difficult for the public to assimilate this information and understand the risks [so please don't explain them in public]," said Dr. Wally Curran, a radiation oncologist and head of Emory University's Winship Cancer Center.
The federal agency said Wednesday it was increasing its nationwide monitoring of radiation in milk, precipitation, drinking water, and other outlets. It already tracks radiation in those potential exposure routes through an existing network of stations across the country.
Results from screening samples of milk taken in the past week in Spokane, Washington, and in San Luis Obispo County, California, detected radioactive iodine, or iodine-131, at a level 5,000 times lower than the limit set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, officials said.
At that level, a person would have to drink 1,000 liters of milk to receive the same amount of radiation as a chest X-ray, said Dr. James Cox, radiation oncologist at Houston's MD Anderson Cancer Center. [Except the radiation from the milk stays in the body well over a thousand times longer than that from a chest X-ray and they stopped giving regular chest X-rays decades ago because the accumulation was very hazardous to your health.]
The I-131 isotope has a very short half-life of about eight days, the EPA said, so the level detected in milk and milk products is expected to drop relatively quickly. [Except if nobody caps it off in Japan, otherwise it just keeps coming.]
"The good news about iodine is, it has a short half-life," said Curran. "It doesn't dwell in any biologic system [except if you want to nitpick about your thyroid], be it an adult, a child, a cow, for any significant period of time, and at those levels there's no evidence that there's any medical significance."
Radiation gets into the milk because it falls on grass eaten by cows. The milk does not itself absorb radiation. [So when we measure the iodine in it, we go measure it in the cow paddies on that glowing green grass and extrapolate from that.]
FDA senior scientist Patricia Hansen also said the findings are "minuscule" compared to what people experience every day.
Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said tests confirmed the milk is safe to drink.
"This morning I spoke with the chief advisers for both the EPA and the FDA and they confirmed that these levels are minuscule and are far below levels of public health concern, including for infants and children," Gregoire said in a statement.
"According to them, a pint of milk at these levels would expose an individual to less radiation than would a five-hour airplane flight." [And yer kid rides in airplanes for five hours radically more often than he drinks milk, right?]
Similarly, the California Department of Public Health reassured residents that the levels do not pose a threat. [Go back to sleep.]
"When radioactive material is spread through the atmosphere, it drops to the ground and gets in the environment. When cows consume grass, hay, feed, and water, radioactivity will be processed and become part of the milk we drink. However, the amounts are so small they pose no threat to public health," the department said. [We checked the paddies.]
At least 15 states have reported radioisotopes from Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in air or water or both. No states have recommended that residents take potassium iodide, a salt that protects the thyroid gland from radioactive iodine.
Iodine-131 has been found in Eastern states from Florida to Massachusetts as well as in Western states like Oregon, Colorado, and California, according to sensors and officials in those states.
None of the levels poses a risk to public health, they said.
At high levels [at ANY levels], the isotope focuses on and accumulates in a person's thyroid gland, Curran said. A medical test for thyroid health involves a person ingesting iodine-131 and undergoing a nuclear scan to examine the gland. [Congratulations! You no longer have to drink the iodine first!]
The Japanese plant has been leaking radiation since it was damaged in a tsunami that followed a massive earthquake March 11 [and so has been here sliming Californians for approximately two weeks and yer still not dead so shaddap.]
[click image]In a sign that radiation is continuing to leak from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, radioactive iodine-131 at a concentration of 4,385 times the maximum level permitted under law has been detected in seawater near the plant, according to the latest data made available Thursday morning.
Japanese authorities were also urged to consider taking action over radioactive contamination outside the 20-kilometer evacuation zone around the plant, as the International Atomic Energy Agency said readings from soil samples collected in the village of Iitate, about 40 km from the plant, exceeded its criteria for evacuation.
The authorities denied that either situation posed an immediate threat to human health, but the government said it plans to enhance radiation data monitoring around the plant on the Pacific coast, about 220 kilometers northeast of Tokyo.
According to the government's nuclear safety agency, the concentration level of radioactive iodine-131 in a seawater sample collected Wednesday afternoon around 330 meters south of the plant exceeded the previous high recorded the day before. In Tuesday's sample, the concentration level was 3,355 times the maximum legal limit.
Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, acknowledged there is a possibility that radiation is continuing to leak into the sea, adding, ''We must check that (possibility) well.''
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The No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 reactors at the plant are believed to have suffered damage to their cores, possibly releasing radioactive substances, while the fuel rods of the No. 4 reactor kept in a spent fuel pool are also believed to have been exposed at one point, as the reactors lost cooling functions after the March 11 quake and tsunami.Prime Minister Naoto Kan said Thursday he will look into reviewing from scratch the existing plan to build at least 14 more nuclear reactors by 2030, as a result of the ongoing nuclear crisis.
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[click image]Smoke was spotted at another nuclear plant in northeastern Japan on Wednesday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.
The company said smoke was detected in the turbine building of reactor No. 1 at the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant around 6 p.m.
Smoke could no longer be seen by around 7 p.m., a company spokesman told reporters.
The Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant is about 6 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, where workers have been scrambling to stave off a meltdown since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems there.
After the dual disasters, Japanese authorities also detected cooling-system problems at the Fukushima Daini plant, and those living within a 10-kilometer radius (6 miles) of Fukushima Daini were ordered to evacuate as a precaution.
[click image]The Japanese government has decided to decommission all six reactors at the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant. TEPCO is also considering the construction of a containment shell at some of its reactors.
Earlier on Wednesday, Tsunehisa Katsumata, a chairman of TEPCO, said the company saw scrapping its four most troubled reactors as inevitable, Kyodo News reports.
However, Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary and top spokesman in the Kan government, went further and suggested that all of the reactors at the Fukushima plant should be scrapped.
"It is very clear looking at the social circumstances. That is my perception," Edano said to a news conference, as quoted by Kyodo News.
In addition, TEPCO is planning to cover the damaged units with a special containment shell made of a high-tech fabric. This cover is aimed at preventing radioactive particles from escaping into the atmosphere, Asahi Shimbun newspaper reports.
Specialists will first apply a unique compound onto all four reactors, to prevent radioactive particles from escaping into the atmosphere, and then will cover units 1, 3 and 4 with the fabric, to enforce the protection.
This decision echoes the steps that Soviet specialists had to undertake in the case of the Chernobyl reactor. It was eventually sealed off within a massive concrete tomb called the sarcophagus. The catastrophe provided valuable lessons in how to deal with a reactor disaster, but also stern warnings about the dangers of nuclear energy.
Japanese workers have been unsuccessfully trying to restore the cooling system at the Fukushima facility, in what is now the worst atomic crisis since Chernobyl. The level of radiation measured in seawater near the site, is now said to be around 3,500 times higher than normal.The government plans to spray a water-soluble resin over debris at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to prevent radiation leaks from spreading further, officials said Wednesday.
An unmanned, remote-controlled vehicle will spray the solution in order to affix radioactive substances onto the debris, the officials said.
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Spraying resin over the debris at the plant is a temporary measure before fundamental measures are taken to contain radioactive substances, the officials added.Anne Lauvergeon, president of Areva SA, has arrived in Japan to offer help in resolving the crisis at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, officials at the French nuclear fuel company said Wednesday.
Accompanied by five French nuclear experts, Lauvergeon's visit appears to underline France's full-fledged commitment to assist Japan, which has sought French help in tackling the crisis.
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Areva is commissioned by Japanese power companies to process uranium-plutonium mixed-oxide fuel, so-called MOX fuel. MOX fuel used at the No. 3 reactor unit at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was manufactured by Areva and was shipped from France.
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[click image]By measuring the energy of the gamma rays from the filters, [people at University of Washington] have identified exactly which fission products have made their way across the Pacific. And this in turn allows them to make a number of interesting inferences about what has gone wrong at Fukushima. Today, they post the results of the first five days of monitoring on the arXiv.
What they found was small amounts of iodine-131, iodine-132, tellurium-132, iodine-133, cesium-134 and cesium 137.
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The first comes from the amount of iodine-131 and tellurium-132 which are both short-lived with half lives of 8 and 3 days respectively. That indicates that they must have come from fuel rods that were recently active rather than from spent fuel.
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[T]hese guys speculate that what they're seeing is the result of contaminated steam being released into the atmosphere.
[click image]Japan's prime minister insisted Tuesday that the country was on "maximum alert" [country, maybe; nukes industry, definitely not] to bring its nuclear crisis under control, but the spread of radiation raised concerns about the ability of experts to stabilize the crippled reactor complex.
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"The removal of the contaminated water is the most urgent task now, and hopefully we can adjust the amount of cooling water going in," he said, adding that workers were building sandbag dikes to keep contaminated water from seeping into the soil outside.
The discovery of plutonium, released from fuel rods only when temperatures are extremely high, confirms the severity of the damage, Nishiyama said.
Plutonium is a highly toxic substance which breaks down very slowly, remaining dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years [which, you will agree, constitutes extreme "very slowly"].
"If you inhale it, it's there and it stays there [for a darn short] forever," said Alan Lockwood, a professor of Neurology and Nuclear Medicine at the University at Buffalo and a member of the board of directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility, an advocacy group. 
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As Americans focus on March Madness and Dancing With the Stars instead of the radioactive plume spreading all across the country, the US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is attempting to make the mainstream media cover up of the Fukushima cloud a bit easier.
The agency now notorious for its infamous claim that the air was safe to breathe after 9/11 is now seeking to raise the PAGs (Protective Action Guides) to levels vastly higher than those at which they are currently set allowing for more radioactive contamination of the environment and the general public in the event of a radioactive disaster.
PAGs are policies established by the EPA that guide the agency in enforcing the various environmental laws such as the Clean Air and Water Act in the invent of a radioactive emergency such as a nuclear/dirty bomb or factory meltdown like that occurring in Japan.
[click image]Not looking for sympathy here, but the life of a political reporter isn’t all champagne and canapes. Consider our man Scott Powers, who was sent over to the Winter Park home of Alan Ginsburg this morning as the designated “pool reporter” — aka scribe — for the fundraiser where Vice President Joe Biden is appearing on behalf of U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.
Turns out the veep hadn’t arrived, but about 150 guests (minimum donation $500) were already in the house. So to prevent Scott from mingling with the crowd, a member of Biden’s advance team consigned him to a storage closet — and then stood outside the door to make sure he didn’t walk out without permission.Radiation levels that can prove fatal were detected outside reactor buildings at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, signaling a partial fuel meltdown and complicating efforts to contain the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
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Plutonium-239, a byproduct of fission used in nuclear weapons, was found in soil samples taken on the plant site March 21 and March 22, Tokyo Electric said in a statement today. Two of the five samples contained more plutonium than known to have been deposited by atmospheric nuclear-bomb fallout and probably came from the damaged plant, according to the statement.
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Plutonium was part of the fuel mix in reactor No. 3. Used fuel rods from other reactors may also have been a source of the material, Edwin Lyman, a radiological specialist for the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, said on a conference call with reporters. Plutonium inhalation causes lung, liver and bone cancer, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.Five of the six biggest container shippers are maintaining routes to Tokyo and Yokohama after the U.S. Navy said radiation on vessels from the leaking Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant can be scrubbed off with soap and water.
A.P Moeller-Maersk A/S, Mediterranean Shipping Co. and CMA CGM SA, the top three, are still serving Japan’s two busiest container ports, 2 1/2 weeks after an earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima plant, 220 kilometers (135 miles) to the north. Among the top six shippers, only Hapag-Lloyd AG, the No. 4, is diverting vessels to docks in the south of the country.
The Japanese government is allowing ships to sail as close as 30 kilometers to the stricken reactors, and the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, says operations in and out of Japan can continue as normal, with levels of radiation presenting no medical basis for imposing restrictions.
“These are extremely low levels and are easily cleaned off,” Commander Jeff Davis, a spokesman for Seventh Fleet, which is helping with recovery efforts, said by yesterday by telephone. “Even if they weren’t, they still wouldn’t rise to the level where they would cause any harm to human health.”
[click image]Officials say they still don't know where the radioactive water is coming from, though government spokesman Yukio Edano earlier said some is "almost certainly" seeping from a damaged reactor core in one of the units.
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A top TEPCO official acknowledged it could take a long time to clean up the complex.
"We cannot say at this time how many months or years it will take," Muto said, insisting the main goal now is to keep the reactors cool.
Workers have been scrambling to remove the radioactive water from the four units and find a place to safely store it. Each unit may hold tens of thousands of gallons of radioactive water, said Minoru Ogoda of Japan's nuclear safety agency.
Safety agency officials had been hoping to pump the water into huge, partly empty tanks inside the reactor that are designed to hold condensed water.
Those tanks, though, turned out to be completely full, said Hidehiko Nishiyama of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
Meanwhile, plans to use regular power to restart the cooling system hit a roadblock when it turned out that cables had to be laid through turbine buildings flooded with the contaminated water.
"The problem is that right now nobody can reach the turbine houses where key electrical work must be done," Nishiyama said. "There is a possibility that we may have to give up on that plan."
Despite Sunday's troubles, officials continued to insist the situation had at least partially stabilized. 
[click image]Six of the Environmental Protection Agency's 12 California sensors — including the three closest to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant near San Luis Obispo — are sending data with "anomalies" to the agency's laboratory in Montgomery, Ala., said Mike Bandrowski, manager of the EPA's radiation program.
The problem delays from 30 minutes to several hours the updating of a database that would be critical for warning the public in case of a sudden radiation danger from air wafting to the United States from a foreign country, for example, or from a radiation leak at a domestic nuclear facility.
The lag has not been a concern during the Japanese nuclear crisis because the minuscule amounts of radiation that have reached California have posed no threat to human health, and the plume of irradiated air from Japan is so widespread that other equipment from Washington to Los Angeles has been able to monitor it in real time, Bandrowski said.
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Without immediate information from RadNet, state and local emergency managers would be dependent on the private owners of nuclear power facilities to alert them in the first hours of a dangerous radiation leak from a domestic source.
"I believe the utilities monitor the sensors; they're good about reporting things," said David McIntyre, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees nuclear reactors in the U.S. He added that federal regulations require nuclear plant operators to report small problems that could lead to a release of radiation, so it's unlikely such an event would come as a surprise.
[click image, try here if those videos don't act right]Mr. Nishiyama [of NISA] on Friday linked the radioactive puddles in plant No. 3 to a possible breach in pipes or ventilators leading to, but not inside, the vessels that surround the core at plant No. 3. Plant officials said later Friday that puddles at Nos. 1 and 2 also contained high levels of radiation.
The precise source of the radiation in the seawater—by air or by water—could yield clues about whether there is new, unanticipated damage in the complex.
Mr. Nishiyama on Saturday said officials weren't sure what caused the latest surge. "Radioactive substances may have been transmitted through the air, or contaminated water could have drained from the plant somehow," he said. "I don't have further ideas."
He also said officials were crafting a plan to deal with the poisonous puddles. "I have heard that [TEPCO] has an idea about a place to store water and is preparing" for drainage, he said.
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No one has to "marry" anyone else politically; no one has to embrace every tenet or belief that an anti-imperialist ally might hold. You simply have to say: "All of us, regardless of our other views, believe this truth to be self-evident: dismantling the empire will bring immediate and enormous benefits to our nation and to the world."
If in your travels you meet the Buddha, throw him through your tv set.
—Davis Fleetwood
I've found that culture, however useful and important, is neither the foundation nor the ceiling of human experience, even if it is commonly used for walls.
I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States. —Hillary Clinton
