Japan admits twice as much radiation released

ELEANOR HALL: To Japan now where nearly three months after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, Japan's nuclear authority has dramatically revised up its estimates of the amount of radiation emitted from the Fukushima nuclear plants in the week after the earthquake.

In a statement overnight, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency more than doubled its original estimate of the radiation in the atmosphere.

Plutonium has also been found for the first time in soil just a few kilometres from the plant. Tests have confirmed the plutonium came from the plant, but researchers say the levels are not a cause for alarm.

A short time ago I spoke to Tokyo correspondent Mark Willacy.

ELEANOR HALL: Mark this is an extraordinary admission from Japan's nuclear safety agency isn't it, that the earlier estimates of the danger were out by more than 100 per cent?

MARK WILLACY: Well the safety agency says that it was taking on board figures that were provided to it by TEPCO because they're based on basically water injection assumptions. Now that's quite technical but that water was pumped in to try and stop the meltdown - as we know now there were partial meltdowns in three of the reactors.

Now the nuclear safety agency is saying it's pushing up - it's doubling the amount of radiation released in the week after the crisis. It's more than doubling it to 770,000 terabecquerels. Now that probably doesn't mean much to people but it is quite a lot of radiation escaping into the atmosphere.

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http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2011/s3237652.htm

Eerie Hush Descends on Japan's Nuclear Zone

FUTABA, Japan—In the Coin Laundry, a dryer is still loaded with clothes: an orange hooded sweatshirt, a green worker's vest and two pairs of jeans, damp and smelling of mildew.

At Joe's Man restaurant near the train station, a menu lists the lunch specials, starting with bacon-and-eggplant pasta in a tomato-cream sauce. A flyer on the open doors of the Nishio clothes shop promotes a five-day "inventory clearance" sale. Over the road that runs through the town center, a white-and-blue sign proclaims: "Understanding Nuclear Power Correctly Will Lead to an Abundant Life."

But life, by and large, is what is absent in this town, just a few miles away from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Futaba, once home to 7,000 residents, is one of eight towns forced to evacuate the day after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami damaged the nuclear plant. In the following days, tens of thousands of residents living within 12 miles of the damaged reactors fled. Last Monday, the Japanese government expanded the mandatory evacuation zone to encompass more towns.

On Sunday, the nuclear complex's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said it aims to get the crippled plant under control with a so-called cold shutdown that brings down pressure and temperatures inside the reactors in six to nine months. Japan Trade Minister Banri Kaieda said some of the evacuees may be able to return after that but acknowledged it wouldn't be possible for all of them to come back then.

Futaba Mayor Katsutaka Idogawa, meanwhile, said it will be "years" before the residents of his town can return. The utility on Friday said it would begin initial compensation payments of up to ¥1 million, or about $12,000, to residents from an 18-mile zone around the plant—an offer some evacuees called an insufficient, short-term sop.

Police have established road blocks on Route 6, the main surface road running north and south through the zone. Authorities have declared evacuation mandatory for the area up to 12 miles from the plant and advised people who are six miles beyond that to stay inside. Police cars, ambulances or fire trucks occasionally patrol the towns inside the mandatory zone. While it isn't illegal to enter the area, it's strongly discouraged.

"What are you doing here?" a fireman asked a reporter walking in the street. From the passenger seat, another firefighter held up a radiation monitor. "You are not supposed to be here. It's dangerous," he said. "Please leave soon."

Some locals are evading the road blocks, traveling into the area by narrow side streets to gather possessions—confronting the possibility of never returning to live in Futaba.

On Thursday, a woman who identified herself as Ms. Takasaki rushed in and out of a beautiful, traditional Japanese home. She said her family is living with relatives in Fukushima City, about 60 miles inland. She had traveled to Futaba with her husband, daughter and father-in-law to pack as many of their possessions as they could in 30 minutes.

She wore a clear rain poncho, a face mask and sunglasses. Her shoes were covered with clear plastic bags, taped around her ankles.

"We're in a big hurry," she said as she carried boxes of clothes to the open trunk of a sedan, handing a stranger an armful of winter coats to carry to the car. "But since this is probably the last time we'll come back here, there are things we needed to get."

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703648304576264434143952142.html

Japanese Declare Crisis at Level of Chernobyl

TOKYO—The Japanese government raised its assessment of the monthlong crisis at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the highest severity level by international standards—a rating only conferred so far upon the Chernobyl accident.

Japan's nuclear regulators said the plant has likely released so much radiation into the environment that it must boost the accident's severity rating on the International Nuclear Event scale to a 7 from 5 currently. That is the same level reached by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union, which struck almost exactly 25 years ago, on April 26, 1986.

"Based on the cumulative data we've gathered, we can finally give an estimate of total radioactive materials emitted,'' Hidehiko Nishiyama, spokesman for Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said at a press conference Tuesday.

Even as they upgraded their assessment of the situation, Japanese officials went to lengths to say that the problem they are struggling to contain isn't anywhere near the disaster of Chernobyl.

"It is quite different from Chernobyl," said Mr. Nishiyama. "First, the amount of released radiation is about a tenth of Chernobyl," he said, adding that while there were 29 deaths resulting from short-term exposure to high doses of radiation at Chernobyl, there were no such deaths at Fukushima.

"At Chernobyl, the nuclear reactor itself exploded," he said, adding that at the Fukushima plant, the pressure vessel and the containment vessel were largely intact.

Still, Fukushima Daiichi operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. warned Tuesday that since the Fukushima Daiichi plant is still releasing radioactive materials, the total level of radiation released could eventually exceed that of Chernobyl, a spokesman said.

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Japanese nuclear plant continues to leak radioactive water into ocean

Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are unable to plug a leak of radioactive water. Meanwhile, Japan's prime minister says it will take months to resolve the problems at the plant. Red Cross says aid payments will begin soon.



Radioactive water continued to seep into the sea Monday after a failed attempt to seal the leak at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant using an absorbent polymer, sawdust and shredded paper.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. officials think the leak has been coming from an 8-inch crack in the concrete pit holding power cables near reactor No. 2. On Monday, Tepco said it would use a dye to try to trace the path of the leak, Kyodo News reported. Radiation levels in the pit water are an estimated 1,000 millisieverts per hour, a high but not immediately lethal dose.

Engineers also planned to begin injecting nitrogen gas into reactors No. 1, 2 and 3 in an attempt to prevent possible explosions from the buildup of hydrogen gas. Explosions at the three reactors in the first four days after the magnitude 9 earthquake and accompanying tsunami March 11 badly damaged the reactor buildings and disabled the cooling pumps that provided water to the reactors. Government officials say it may take months to fully restore the cooling systems.

Japan's official death toll from the disaster topped 12,000 on Sunday, as about 25,000 U.S. and Japanese troops finished an intensive three-day recovery effort. The search located 78 bodies, but more than 15,000 people are still officially listed as missing. About 160,000 survivors remain in shelters.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-reactor-damage-20110403,0,1606193.story?track=rss

Japan earthquake: strong quake prompts tsunami warning for disaster zone

The earthquake, measuring 6.5 on the Richter Scale, was pinpointed to 50 miles east of Oshika peninsula in Miyagi prefecture, an area still recovering from the devastation of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Following the new earthquake, the Japanese authorities issued a 20 inch tsunami warning for the Pacific coastal region which was later lifted, with no reports of immediate casualties or further damage.

Japan's weather agency said that the strong tremor was believed to be the latest in a string of aftershocks to hit the region following the massive earthquake just over two weeks ago.

A large clean-up and restoration project remains in place across the northeast of Japan following widespread devastation and the loss of more than 27,000 lives.

Fears of radiation contamination are continuing to hamper procedures and are causing widespread unease following damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Teams of workers at the nuclear plant located 150 miles north of Tokyo are continuing a tense battle around the clock to stem radiation leaks and restore control inside four of its six reactors.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the operators of the plant, caused confusion on Sunday when they erroneously reported that radiation levels in water within one of the reactors was 10 million times higher than normal.

After correcting this to 100,000 times higher the government strongly criticised TEPCO for the "absolutely unacceptable" mistake.

The highly contaminated water has now been attributed to the partial melting of the Number 2 reactor's fuel rods after it was hit by the March 11 earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, said: "The radiation seems to have come from the fuel rods that were partially melted down and came into contact with the water used to cool the reactor.

"Steam may have condensed [ ] carrying water from within the containment vessel."

Rolling blackouts to cut back on electricity use in the Kanto region of Japan were resumed today to help counter the energy shortages caused by damage to the nuclear plant.


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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8410322/Japan-earthquake-strong-quake-prompts-tsunami-warning-for-disaster-zone.html

New Problems at Japanese Plant Subdue Optimism

The Japanese electricians who bravely strung wires this week to all six reactor buildings at a stricken nuclear power plant succeeded despite waves of heat and blasts of radioactive steam.

The restoration of electricity at the plant, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, stirred hopes that the crisis was ebbing. But nuclear engineers say some of the most difficult and dangerous tasks are still ahead — and time is not necessarily on the side of the repair teams.

The tasks include manually draining hundreds of gallons of radioactive water and venting radioactive gas from the pumps and piping of the emergency cooling systems, which are located diagonally underneath the overheated reactor vessels. The urgency of halting the spread of radioactive contamination from the site was underlined on Wednesday by the health warning that infants should not drink tap water — even in Tokyo, 140 miles southwest of the stricken plant — raised alarms about extensive contamination.

“We’ve got at least 10 days to two weeks of potential drama before you can declare the accident over,” said Michael Friedlander, who worked as a nuclear plant operator for 13 years.

Nuclear engineers have become increasingly concerned about a separate problem that may be putting pressure on the Japanese technicians to work faster: salt buildup inside the reactors, which could cause them to heat up more and, in the worst case, cause the uranium to melt, releasing a range of radioactive material.

“A meltdown is looking less likely, but a lot of radiation has been released in the reactor buildings and may continue to seep out,” said a Western nuclear power executive who asked not to be quoted by name because he did not want to risk his broad contacts in Japan. “What we might have is a slow-moving contamination problem rather than a fast-moving contamination problem.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/world/asia/24nuclear.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Indian government: food from Japan to be tested for radiation

NEW DELHI, March 16 (Xinhua) -- The Indian government has ordered food originating from Japan to be tested for radiation in the wake of explosions at a Japanese nuclear plant following a devastating earthquake-tsunami last Friday, reported local media Wednesday.

Authorized officers of Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) at Indian ports, airports have been asked by the government to get food originating from Japan after March 11, 2011 to be tested for radiation, according to Press Trust of India.

The Department of Revenue, Government of India, has also been requested to advise all the customs points in the country where imported food is cleared, to test samples on similar lines, according to the report.

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http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/health/2011-03/16/c_13781273.htm