Category: Nuclear

A new water leak, possibly from the effort to cool a crippled reactor, has been detected on the first floor of a reactor building at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Jan. 18. TEPCO said workers discovered by a video feed that water was leaking on the first floor of the wrecked No. 3 reactor building earlier in the day. The utility added that the water was flowing into the basement of the reactor building and not outside the structure. It is investigating the source of the leak. TEPCO suggested the possibilities that the water was leaking from a pipe that is sending cooling water to the reactor or from the reactor containment vessel. If the leak is from water being used to cool the reactor, it would be highly contaminated and a new headache for TEPCO […]

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A study published in the Elsevier journal Anthropocene late last year has revealed that many of the rivers, streams and other waterways located throughout coastal Japan have inadvertently become delivery systems for transporting radioactive waste directly from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility into the Pacific Ocean. Researchers from both France and Japan discovered this after conducting a thorough sediment and soil erosion analysis, which revealed the presence of cesium-137, cesium-134 and even radioactive silver in the runoff from coastal rivers. A total of 2,200 soil samples were collected as part of the study, which was originally designed to look at the normal biogeochemical cycles and dispersion of contaminants via rivers and waterways. Since it is already known that rivers play a functional role in cleansing the natural environment of toxins, a team of scientists from the Laboratory for Climate Sciences and […]

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T, the utility at the center of Japan’s worst nuclear accident, won government approval Wednesday for a restructuring that will allow it to receive an additional ¥4 trillion ($38 billion) in state funding. But the new plan doesn’t offer a clear road map to return the company to financial health as it struggles with the high costs of cleaning up the devastated Fukushima Daiichi plant and paying compensation to those in the area affected by the high level of […]

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In the depths of Japan’s nuclear crisis in March 2011, a small band of workers at the Fukushima power plant stayed behind, stomaching daily doses of deadly radiation to bring the plant under control after a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered multiple meltdowns. They became known as the Fukushima 50. “We felt we had a responsibility to put things right,” nuclear engineer Atsufumi Yoshizawa told America Tonight. “And we felt that we were probably the only ones that could deal with the situation.” The courage of employees like Yoshizawa made them heroes in Japan, and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the operator of the stricken power plant, showcases them as symbols for what the company represents. But there is another group of workers that TEPCO rarely mentions, workers who […]

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The Pacific Ocean appears to be dying, according to a new study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California recently discovered that the number of dead sea creatures blanketing the floor of the Pacific is higher than it has ever been in the 24 years that monitoring has taken place, a phenomenon that the data suggests is a direct consequence of nuclear fallout from Fukushima. Though the researchers involved with the work have been reluctant to pin Fukushima as a potential cause — National Geographic , which covered the study recently, did not even mention Fukushima — the timing of the discovery suggests that Fukushima is, perhaps, the cause. According to the data, this sudden explosion in so-called "sea snot," which is the name given to the masses […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

Click here to view full article at www.reuters.com