Japan Earthquake

Japan Earthquake | Page 2464

Ah, the silence of daytime in Japan
by bo 10/7/2011 4:45:59 AM

Radiation in Japan
Hot spots and blind spots
The mounting human costs of Japan’s nuclear disaster:

www.economist.com

"Iitate is located 45km (28 miles) from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant hit by a tsunami on March 11th this year. In the mountains above the town, the forests are turning the colour of autumn. But their beauty is deceptive. Every time a gust of wind blows, Mr Sato says it shakes invisible particles of radioactive caesium off the trees and showers them over the village. Radiation levels in the hills are so high that villagers dare not go near them. Mr Sato cannot bury his father’s bones, which he keeps in an urn in his abandoned farmhouse, because of the dangers of going up the hill to the graveyard."
by bo 10/7/2011 5:31:42 AM

Cesium surges in ash halt Kashiwa incinerator: search.japantimes.co.jp
by bo 10/7/2011 5:33:40 AM

Continued good stuff from Japan Focus

Bringing the Plight of Fukushima Children to the UN, Washington and the World: japanfocus.org
by bo 10/7/2011 6:28:18 AM

バンプ
by bo 10/7/2011 7:51:13 AM

バンプ
by bo 10/7/2011 9:04:10 AM

@bo bump
by elainekirk 10/7/2011 9:30:02 AM

Osaka residents voice radiation concerns over Fukushima-made bridge girders mdn.mainichi.jp The bridge girders were manufactured in a factory in Koriyama in February this year and had been kept outdoors on the factory's premises. A private inspection entity checked the bridge girders and found the amount of radiation to be 0.7 millisieverts, as compared to an annual limit of 1 millisievert for ordinary residents set by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. Because there are no national safety standards for civil engineering materials such as bridge girders, the Osaka Prefectural Government is considering asking the central government to set safety standards for such construction materials at an early date.
by Luisa 10/7/2011 9:30:16 AM

Gov't releases new radiation map for Tohoku, Kanto districts The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has released a new map showing the spread of radiation from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant across 10 prefectures, including Tokyo and Kanagawa. The map released on Oct. 6 shows levels of radioactive cesium (cesium-137 and cesium-134) that have accumulated in soil in the prefectures of Yamagata, Miyagi, Fukushima, Tochigi, Gunma, Ibaraki, Saitama, Chiba, Kanagawa and Tokyo.
mdn.mainichi.jp
by Luisa 10/7/2011 9:30:20 AM

www.tepco.co.jp
View of the cut trees from the northwest of Unit 5 and 6, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
And that is tepco news for the day
by elainekirk via Tepco.co.jp 10/7/2011 10:10:57 AM

@elainekirk and @Luisa hi there. I'm off to ride home. Be back after a bit.
by bo 10/7/2011 10:11:30 AM

Hi@elainekirk, there is a reason for them to start cutting trees down. Look:
“Now it’s known that most part of the plume is stuck to the trees or soil in the mountains, where you can hardly decontaminate.”
www.infiniteunknown.net
by Liz 10/7/2011 10:25:05 AM

@Liz I wonder what they plan to do with the wood pile....as if we didnt know
by elainekirk 10/7/2011 10:25:44 AM

Burn it?
by Liz 10/7/2011 10:26:59 AM

@elainekirk They're going to spray radioactive water on the logs TEPCO starts sprinkling decontaminated water

The Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, has started sprinkling decontaminated water on the premises of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
TEPCO on Friday began spraying the water onto trees cut down and piled on the plant's compound. The utility says dry trees could catch fire spontaneously.
The water was taken from facilities for temporary storage of water with low levels of radioactivity that had accumulated in the basements of 2 reactor turbine buildings. The buildings did not incur major damage in the March disaster.
The facilities contain about 17,000 tons of such water, and are filled to nearly 90 percent of their capacity.
TEPCO removed salt and radioactive substances from the water before the sprinkling process, and says levels of cesium and other radioactive substances in the water are below government standards for public beaches.
The company also says local communities and fishery associations approved the operation.
TEPCO plans to release 100 tons of decontaminated water daily on about 1.2 million square meters of land in the compound.
www3.nhk.or.jp
by Luisa 10/7/2011 10:27:16 AM

www.tepco.co.jp
this is a video of them jet washing the trees? no doubt they purified all the run off water !?!?
by elainekirk 10/7/2011 10:28:11 AM

www.tepco.co.jp
more pics of the tree washing / chopping docs.google.com
by elainekirk via Tepco.co.jp 10/7/2011 10:31:01 AM

The outdoor workers doing 'decontamination' work are finally going to get some protection. After how many months?! New safety rules for outdoor nuclear workers
Japan's health ministry will introduce safety guidelines to protect workers who clean up radioactive substances around the disabled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Existing guidelines target only those working indoors at the plant.
Citizens groups had complained that the ministry was not doing enough to minimize the exposure of workers who engage in decontamination outdoors.
The new guidelines will require outdoor clean-up workers to wear protective masks and carry dosimeters to monitor radiation.
The ministry says it will work to ensure that the rules are upheld, as efforts to decontaminate farmland and residential areas near the Daiichi plant will soon begin in earnest.
www3.nhk.or.jp
by Luisa 10/7/2011 10:35:30 AM

@Luisa gobsmacked
by elainekirk 10/7/2011 10:36:25 AM

ex-skf-jp.blogspot.com
this skf post refers to a tepco subsidiary company being in line to get the lucrative contract for cleaning up Tokyo tweeted by rockhopper
by elainekirk 10/7/2011 10:37:51 AM

In this clip from 2007, Victor Petrick, inventor and academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences shows his invention. This mobile filtering system uses Nanotechnology to clean liquid radioactive waste and turns it into drinking water.
www.youtube.com
by Liz 10/7/2011 10:39:36 AM

@Liz I dont think I would want to drink it ....
by elainekirk 10/7/2011 10:42:35 AM

"That's when the word 'Chernobyl' came back into my life. It was mentioned by certain people in the medical establishment that it could possibly have a link to my cancer."

Doctors have told Ms Munro it was impossible to establish a direct link between her cancer and the exposure to radioactive fallout she experienced.

But she wants to find her fellow students, to discover if any others have become ill. The group was drawn from universities across the UK.

A documentary to be broadcast by BBC Scotland tells how the collapse of the Soviet Union meant no definitive research was ever carried out into the impact of the Chernobyl disaster on human health.

Even estimates of the death toll vary wildly, ranging from 50 to a million.
www.bbc.co.uk
Professor Keith Baverstock, who led the World Health Organisation's radiation protection programme for more than 10 years, believes new research is vital.

He said: "There's the next generation to think of. There's some evidence that a kind of mutation has been passed down to future generations and we don't know what the health consequences of this are, so we have to study that."
by elainekirk 10/7/2011 10:47:52 AM

A good, extended article on limitations of the 'decontamination' approaches being used invillages and towns. True radiation decontamination still a long way away "It might make you feel like you're decontaminating, but there's a limit to the amount of radioactive cesium that's caked onto roofs that can be eliminated with high-pressure water cleaners," says Kunihiro Yamada, a professor of environmental science at Kyoto Seika University. "The water cleaners wash surface dirt off, but then that tainted water goes into sewers and can contaminate rivers, thereby affecting farm goods and seafood. If people in highly populated areas were to begin using water cleaners, we may end up finding people forcing tainted water onto each other." mdn.mainichi.jp
by Luisa 10/7/2011 10:48:55 AM

@Luisa you are keeping me busy tweting these ty
by elainekirk 10/7/2011 10:58:03 AM

Time to go, good night all
by Luisa 10/7/2011 11:07:00 AM

Good nite, Luisa.
by Liz 10/7/2011 11:10:10 AM

@all, I just read this question in a German blog: Directly on the ocean between reactor 1 and 5 is a storage building for dry casks. It got flooded. No one has talked about problems at that site. What happened there and how much fuel was stored there?
by Liz 10/7/2011 11:10:21 AM

@all, does anybody know?
by Liz 10/7/2011 11:12:05 AM

@Liz I would have to look up the total fuel stored number I have it somewhere. The building flooded and the trolley was off the track but the casks were fine. About the only thing there that handled the storm without a catastrophe. Give me about 15min to finish something else and I can grab data etc on the casks.
by lillymunster 10/7/2011 11:16:00 AM

@Liz, stats on cask storage

Some specs on the cask building
Storage Casks
Large 115 tons, 5.6m long, 2.4m diameter, 52 assemblies
Med 96 tons, 5.6m long, 2.2m diameter, 37 assemblies
alloy steel barrels, resin neutron shield, basket aluminum alloy w/ boron, filled with helium.
storage capacity 6840 assemblies (90 assembly racks x 76 units)
approx 200% of the amount of a total reactor core loading
approx 12.m wide x 29m long x 11m deep
by lillymunster 10/7/2011 11:39:46 AM

Inside cask storage
www.houseoffoust.com
by lillymunster via Houseoffoust 10/7/2011 11:40:47 AM

walkways behind the casks
www.houseoffoust.com
by lillymunster via Houseoffoust 10/7/2011 11:41:29 AM

I have a bunch more images inside the cask building (pre-disaster) and inside the reactor buildings here. www.houseoffoust.com

There are two photos I know of from the cask building post-disaster. I can't remember if I have copies saved or where. They showed a damaged overhead garage door and some mud and debris in the trolley track area.
by lillymunster 10/7/2011 11:43:38 AM

Thank you so much @lillymunster =)
by Liz 10/7/2011 11:48:34 AM

@Liz no problem. I have piles of photos from way back when we were first gathering information over on my personal site. I really need to come up with some sort of searchable photo system to put them all in.

This is my old site with images www.houseoffoust.com
by lillymunster 10/7/2011 11:50:13 AM

Reading the article about spraying low level rad water on the trees... ::headdesk::
by lillymunster 10/7/2011 11:57:32 AM

@lillymunster it is a test of how much crap the media/govs/people will take and methinks tepco have proved a point if this is accepted
by elainekirk 10/7/2011 12:19:52 PM

@elainekirk it is so absurd you want to laugh. What a convenient way to rid themselves of the water.
by lillymunster 10/7/2011 12:21:36 PM

@lillymunster totally did you see rockhoppers about their subsidiary getting contract for decontaminating tokyo you have to laugh
by elainekirk 10/7/2011 12:34:09 PM