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Govt lowers land assessments for disaster zone

The government has lowered its land price assessments for areas of northeastern Japan affected by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami.

Land assessments for inheritance and gift tax calculations are set annually on January 1st. This means that damage from the March disaster is not reflected in this year's calculations.

The National Tax Agency on Tuesday released land price adjustment rates for locations in 10 prefectures, including a plunge of 80 percent for Onagawa in Miyagi Prefecture. Many of the town's residents were killed by the tsunami.

Other municipalities in Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima prefectures were assessed with a 70 to 75 percent drop in land prices.

This is the second time the agency has had to adjust land price rates in the wake of a disaster.
After the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake that struck Kobe and vicinity in western Japan, land prices in affected areas were downgraded, but the maximum price fall then was 25 percent.

The adjustments do not apply to areas around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Land prices there will be assigned zero as it is nearly impossible to evaluate the commercial effect of radioactive contamination on property.

Tuesday, November 01, 2011 16:37 +0900 (JST)
www3.nhk.or.jp

If anyone has time to take a look at the write up on the condensate tank information - I have it compiled into an article but it is in peer review wp.me

i think the cst story is another proof for the weakness of bwr design, and it is probably the first article that deals with this problem in fukushima. remember how long it took us to simply identify those tanks. it is a miracle that they still seem operable.

@dean hi

@lilly.. very good cst article

www2.jnes.go.jp @ lilly.. here is some back up information on the condensate storage tanks.. The Shimane Nuclear Power Station Unit-1 had been under the periodical inspection. When the condensate storage tank (Note 1) was inspected, it was recognized that part (about 8 mm in minimum plate thickness) of the installation portion of the tank water level meter piping was less than the necessary plate thickness (9.9 mm) specified in the technical standards (Note 2) due to corrosion.

@lilly.. here is some information about a CST at Vermont Yankee, note the fact that the CST which is used as one source for ECCS is not a TECH SPEC SYSTEM and thus made of carbon steel and not built to safety system component requirements... "The Condensate Storage Tank (an outside tank) communicate with the reactor primary system by buried piping, aka the Condensate Transfer System. Your plant has this, and so does Vermont Yankee. This is how tritiated water gets into the groundwater via leaks. "Covering it on rounds" is not going to reveal this - your environmental ground well monitoring is about the only way, unless it is a large leak that radwaste processing balances can reveal. It is not a Tech Spec system and therefore has been neglected on monitoring/upkeep in the past"
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So the cst isn't considered a critical system?

@lilly.. correct, however it may differ from NPP to another in USA.. it appears that most use the suppression pool as the credited system and the CST as alternate and thus not robust in design or fabrication

taking a break

I cleaned up the unit 5 notes into an article. I had forgotten about it until I was going through things this morning. I cleaned it up into a post. Let me know if there is something that should be added. wp.me

@all - the nukeworker conversation Dean posted is pretty informative if you ever wanted to know how tritium leaks happen. :-)

@M.I.A. :-) thanks! BTW, the videos of the intakes at 5 and 6 show the nasty mess made in the intakes. Links to the videos are in my post below about unit 5 notes. I remember discussions early on about the ramifications of putting salt water into the reactors.

@all - did anyone have any thoughts on the iodine 131 being found in rice harvested in Oct? I didn't think iodine was readily absorbed by plants and having noticeable amounts now, could it be anything other than recriticality?

changed it in my notes Peter. I will do an update on the document this evening. Since there was so much additional input added today I think I will send it back here for one more look before publishing to make sure I have things added in correctly.

I have a list of news articles to go through from last night, some to get worked into articles, others to get put into the new news feed.

@Peter, Dean - I wondered about water hitting boiling points in an accident where you don't have an operating way to cool off the water loop. I should be around this afternoon and evening - let me know what you both have on this. It could be an important factor. I can't think of anything in the emergency systems to deal with this in a situation such as fuku because everything is closed loop - if you don't have water running the other side of the loop to the ultimate heat sink wouldn't all the water eventually get too hot to do much good?