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Special Report: Japan’s homeless recruited for murky Fukushima clean-up

Seiji Sasa hits the train station in this northern Japanese city before dawn most mornings to prowl for homeless men. He isn’t a social worker. He’s a recruiter. The men in Sendai Station are potential laborers that Sasa can dispatch to contractors in Japan’s nuclear disaster zone for a bounty of $100 a head. "This is how labor recruiters like me come in every day," Sasa says, as he strides past men sleeping on cardboard and clutching at their coats against the early winter cold. It’s also how Japan finds people willing to accept minimum wage for one of the most undesirable jobs in the industrialized world: working on the $35 billion, taxpayer-funded effort to clean up radioactive fallout across an area of northern Japan larger than Hong Kong. Almost three years ago, a massive earthquake and tsunami leveled villages across Japan’s northeast coast and […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Fukushima's last two reactors to be decommissioned

Tokyo Electric Power Company, operator of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, will decommission the facility’s two remaining reactors, Units 5 and 6. Reactors 1 to 4 were declared defunct in April, 2012, 13 months after the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami. That leaves Japan with just 48 operable nuclear reactors, all of which remain offline, pending safety checks after the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. "With the decision to decommission the two units, the whole power station will now be decommissioned," Tepco said in a statement Wednesday. "We feel an overwhelming sense of shame and regret at the fact that by this accident, we have failed to repay the trust placed in us by the local residents," the utility said. The entire 6-unit facility had a total output 4,696 megawatts. Last month, Tepco started the delicate operation of removing more than 1,000 nuclear […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Fukushima’s last two reactors to be decommissioned

Tokyo Electric Power Company, operator of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, will decommission the facility’s two remaining reactors, Units 5 and 6. Reactors 1 to 4 were declared defunct in April, 2012, 13 months after the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami. That leaves Japan with just 48 operable nuclear reactors, all of which remain offline, pending safety checks after the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. "With the decision to decommission the two units, the whole power station will now be decommissioned," Tepco said in a statement Wednesday. "We feel an overwhelming sense of shame and regret at the fact that by this accident, we have failed to repay the trust placed in us by the local residents," the utility said. The entire 6-unit facility had a total output 4,696 megawatts. Last month, Tepco started the delicate operation of removing more than 1,000 nuclear […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Japan Takes Nuclear Storage Hunt Into Own Hands

Japan has decided to take matters into its own hands to find appropriate domestic locations to permanently store highly radioactive nuclear waste, after waiting in vain for more than a decade for an offer from a regional government. "The government will play an active role in choosing a permanent place," Industry Minister Toshimitsu Motegi told reporters at a regular news conference Tuesday. "We’ll abandon the current system of waiting for volunteers to raise their hands." Japan, which currently doesn’t have any final disposal sites for high level radioactive waste, has 17,000 metric tons of domestically spent nuclear fuel that dates back to the 1970s. Most of the current waste is stored in a facility in Rokkasho, a small village in Aomori prefecture in northern Japan, where it is mixed with liquid glass to let it consolidate in big cylindrical bins. The prefecture only allowed the facility to be established […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Japan sets aside $1 billion for nuclear fallout storage

The total cost of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown may never be known, but the country has at least put a number on how much it anticipates storing the radioactive debris will cost it.  Asahi Shimbun reports that the 2014 Japanese budget includes a 100 billion yen provision (roughly $970 million) for the purchase and development of land for “intermediate storage facilities.” Once construction and operation costs are also included, the total anticipated expense is calculated to be 1 trillion yen, or just under $10 billion. Though Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the disaster-stricken plant, was expected to handle all decontamination work, its financial struggles have delayed the cleanup and the government is now stepping in with public funds to speed things up. Construction and operation costs raise the total to 1 trillion yen There are multiple candidate sites in […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Japan to Call Nuclear Power 'Important'

In an attempt to overturn the previous administration’s pledge to phase out nuclear power, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government will call it an “important source of energy for the country” in its new energy plan. The first draft of the plan disclosed at an expert panel meeting Friday described nuclear power as a way to “stabilize Japan’s energy supply-demand structure” and said that the country will continue to use it. Given the traumas of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident and widespread public opposition to nuclear power, the government’s declaration of the importance of nuclear energy is a significant step toward trying to restart some of Japan’s 50 currently idled reactors. The panel, appointed by Mr. Abe’s government, has been discussing the plan since the premier took office after his party won a landslide victory in the Lower House elections in December 2012. While Mr. Abe has made bringing […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Japan to Call Nuclear Power ‘Important’

In an attempt to overturn the previous administration’s pledge to phase out nuclear power, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government will call it an “important source of energy for the country” in its new energy plan. The first draft of the plan disclosed at an expert panel meeting Friday described nuclear power as a way to “stabilize Japan’s energy supply-demand structure” and said that the country will continue to use it. Given the traumas of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident and widespread public opposition to nuclear power, the government’s declaration of the importance of nuclear energy is a significant step toward trying to restart some of Japan’s 50 currently idled reactors. The panel, appointed by Mr. Abe’s government, has been discussing the plan since the premier took office after his party won a landslide victory in the Lower House elections in December 2012. While Mr. Abe has made bringing […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Fukushima Nuclear Situation Still ‘Very Complex’ Despite Progress

IAEA Water Storage Tanks The UN’s nuclear watchdog on Wednesday delivered a preliminary report on their review of Japan’s efforts to plan and implement the decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station that suffered a meltdown during the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Following a 10-day visit, a 19-member team of experts praised Japan for making progress on shutting down the crippled plant, but warned that the situation there remained “very complex”. The International Atomic Energy Agency ( IAEA ) team also acknowledged that processed water now kept on site would probably have to be dumped in the ocean. “We are still at the beginning of a lengthy process but Japan is gaining a better understanding of the situation, an understanding that is critical to address the challenges,” said team leader Juan Carlos Lentijo, Director of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology at the IAEA […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Releasing radioactive water an option for Fukushima?

TOKYO, Dec. 5 (UPI) — The International Atomic Energy Agency has suggested that Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, consider discharging less harmful radioactive water from the site into the sea. The recommendation was included in a preliminary report released Wednesday, following a 10-day review by IAEA’s 19-member team — headed by Juan Carlos Lentijo, the agency’s Director of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology — to observe the decommissioning process at the plant, stricken by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. Tepco last month started the delicate operation of removing more than 1,000 nuclear fuel-rod assemblies from the spent fuel pool inside the damaged No. 4 reactor building. Tepco expects to complete that process by the end of 2014. The overall decommissioning work at the stricken nuclear plant, however, is expected to take as long as 40 years. In addition to […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Oil led to Pearl Harbor

Oil led to Pearl Harbor Few people realize that it was oil — the shortage of oil — that precipitated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Tensions between the United States and Japan were rising throughout that fateful year. Having initiated a war with China (America’s ally) and occupied Indochina, Japan’s totalitarian government was intent on imposing its will on all of the people of East Asia. In the summer of 1941, before leaving for Placentia Bay, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had ordered a freeze on Japanese assets. That measure required the Japanese to seek and obtain licenses to export and pay for each shipment of goods from the United States, including oil. This move was most distressing to the Japanese because they were dependent on the United States for most of their crude oil and refined petroleum products. However, Roosevelt did not want […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple