China PANICS After Fukushima Fears

 

The Chinese Communist Party has been stoking fears about Japan releasing water into the ocean from its Fukushima nuclear power plant, and it's not because it's actually worried about peoples' safety. In this episode of China Uncensored, we look at China's ban on Japanese seafood, other ways the CCP is stoking anti-Japanese sentiment, and China's own hypocrisy on the issue.

Inside Japan's Nuclear Meltdown FRONTLINE

A devastating earthquake and tsunami struck Japan on March 11, 2011 triggering a crisis inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex. This 2012 documentary reveals how close the world came to a nuclear nightmare.

Return to Fukushima

Three families exploring the dangers -and desires - of finally going home and explores the difficult journey the residents of Fukushima still have to take.

Returning to Fukushima | Explorer

The Dai-ichi Nuclear Plant in Fukushima suffered a meltdown in 2011. Now, Japan has a plan for residents to return to the area.

Fukushima 360: walk through a ghost town in the nuclear disaster zone – video

What happens to a town that has been abandoned for seven years after a nuclear meltdown? Greenpeace took former residents and a 360-degree camera into the radiation zone north of Fukushima to mark the anniversary of the disaster. The Fukushima Daiichi plant was damaged by a tsunami triggered by a magnitude-9 earthquake on the afternoon of 11 March 2011. The tsunami killed almost 19,000 people along the north-east coast of Japan and forced more than 150,000 others living near the plant to flee radiation. Some of the evacuated neighbourhoods are still deemed too dangerous for former residents to go back.

Fukushima

After Fukushima: faces from Japan's tsunami tragedy, five years on

On the anniversary of the 2011 disaster that killed 19,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more, life and hope continue a steady resurgence, writesJustin McCurry

Interviews by Justin McCurry

Thursday 10 March 2016 06.40 GMT

On 11 March 2011 a powerful earthquake and tsunami struck the north-east coast of Japan and triggered a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Almost 19,000 people died in the tsunami, while 160,000 people fled radiation in Fukushima. Five years on more than 174,000 survivors remain displaced, including almost 100,000 people from Fukushima who have yet to return to their homes.

But there are signs, too, that for some people life is returning to a semblance of normality.

To mark the anniversary of Japan’s worst disaster since the war, the Guardian met six people whose courage and determination has inspired other people across the disaster-hit region. From the mayor of a radiation-hit city who refused to leave, to a traumatised fisherman who now looks after his elderly neighbours – ordinary people who, in a few terrifying minutes, saw their lives transformed by catastrophe.

Even robots can't stand Fukushima radiation for long (video)

Japan's long history as a "safe" country meant that the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) was not in the mindset of predicting disasters in a way that may have mitigated the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, an adviser to Tepco says.

Lake Barrett, who is advising Tepco on the decommissioning of the damaged nuclear plant, says that it was also difficult for the Japanese public to understand afterward what went wrong at Fukushima.

"It's highly technical, and the emotions that go with it are huge," Barrett told CNBC's " Street Signs ."

TEPCO did everything in its power to cover up what happened at Fukushima. From their inability to deal with any sort of crisis. To refusing to listen to outside advice as what could have been done to prevent the meltdown at Fukushima.



The Great East Japan Earthquake unleashed towering tsunami that roared ashore, ravaging 700 kilometers (435 miles) of coastline and killing 15,894 people (a further 2,562 others are still listed as missing). More than 450,000 people were forced from their homes. Many in Japan and abroad remember the aerial video of seawater spilling into coastal communities and inland areas like dark ink across a page, destroying residences, offices, cars and anything else in its path. The surges of water were as high as 39 meters (128 feet) in some places, pushing water as far as 10 kilometers (6.24 miles) inland, flooding more than 560 square kilometers (348 square miles) and creating more than 20 million tons of debris, of which 5 million tons was washed out to sea.

In search of truth - Truth, as seen by an American journalist | Jake Adelstein | TEDxHaneda

Japan's media has had a rough couple of years under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Japan's state secret law, passed in 2013, imposes harsh penalties on people for leaking classified information — and could even be used to imprison reporters who ask about secrets.

"The Abe government has largely succeeded in emasculating the Japanese media," Koichi Nakano, a professor at Tokyo's Sophia University, told the Financial Times this summer, in explaining how the government had suppressed news of Abe being heckled at an event in Okinawa. This and other developments, according to the newspaper, had "stoked fears about press freedom in Japan."

To begin with, according to Adelstein, the nature of Japan's media landscape makes it particularly vulnerable to censorship.

Japan has a media credentialing scheme, called the press club system, which gives certain recognized major media outlets special access and reporting privileges. "Magazines, or small newspapers, or internet broadcasting sites that might report something interesting don't get a fair shot," he explains.

Fukushima Cleanup Money: Enriched Corporations; Cleaned Up Nothing

Tokyo Electric Power Co spokesman Teruaki Kobayashi said all of the equipment contributed to stabilizing the plant, even though some operated only briefly.
Some of the failures cited in the report:

FRENCH IMPORT: Among the costliest failures was a 32 billion yen machine made by French nuclear giant Areva SA to remove radioactive cesium from water leaking from the three wrecked reactors. The trouble-plagued machine lasted just three months and treated only 77,000 tons of water, a tiny fraction of the volume leaking every day. It has since been replaced with Japanese and American machines.

SALT REMOVAL: Sea water was used early in the crisis to cool the reactors after the normal cooling systems failed. Machines costing 18.4 billion yen from several companies including Hitachi GE Nuclear Energy, Toshiba Corp and Areva were supposed to remove the salt from the contaminated water at the plant. One of the machines functioned only five days, and the longest lasted just six weeks.

SHODDY TANKS: TEPCO hurriedly built dozens of storage tanks for the contaminated water at a cost of 16 billion yen. The shoddy tanks, using rubber seals and assembled by unskilled workers, began leaking and some water seeped into the ground and then into the ocean. The tanks are now being replaced with more durable welded ones.

GIANT UNDERGROUND POOLS: A total of 2.1 billion yen was spent on seven huge underground pools built by Maeda Corp to store the contaminated water. They leaked within weeks, and the water had to be transferred to steel tanks.


UNFROZEN TRENCH: A 100 million yen project to contain highly contaminated water in a maintenance tunnel by freezing it failed because the water never completely froze. TEPCO subsidiary Tokyo Power Technology even threw in chunks of ice, but eventually had to pour in cement to seal the trench. 

Transcripts From Interview With Mao Yoshida the Chief of Fukushima Plant No. 1

Mao Yoshida the former chief of Fukushima power plant no.1 died in July of 2013


At the time, both the pressure and temperature were surging inside of quake-hit reactor No. 2, evoking fears of the worst-case scenario.
“All of the nuclear materials could escape and spread. Our image was that of a catastrophe for eastern Japan,” he is quoted as saying in the government’s formerly top-secret transcripts of its interviews with him, finally released Thursday after leaks.


Any explosion in reactor No. 2 resulting in the release of massive amounts of deadly nuclear material would immediately halt the injection of coolant water into reactors 1 and 3, putting them in the same situation as reactor 2.
“This is the part I really don’t want to recall,” Yoshida said during the interview session, which took place in August 2011.



In the interviews, Yoshida explained in detail how the crisis developed and how he and his coworkers responded. He also stressed that, during the crisis, he and his colleagues never thought of withdrawing everyone from the crippled plant.
Given the lack of information from the plant, the government’s leaders, including Prime Minister Naoto Kan, suspected that Tepco’s top executives in Tokyo were at one point considering pulling everyone out and abandoning the six-reactor station.
“(Tepco’s) head office and the prime minister’s office may have been having absurd discussions (about a withdrawal), but did (the workers) run away? They didn’t,” Yoshida is quoted as saying.
He said that even when he was pondering the worst-case scenario, he thought he would have to keep a skeleton crew on hand, including himself. Nonessential workers, however, would have been urged to leave, he added.


He also alleged that the desperate effort by Self-Defense Forces personnel, firefighters and police officers to get water into the dangerously hot spent-fuel pools “were all meaningless” given the small amount of water they were working with.
An SDF helicopter, dipping a huge bucket in the ocean, flew over the fuel pools and tried to dump the water into them. Water cannon trucks operated by the SDF, firefighters and police also shot water at the pools, and they were all praised as brave heroes.
But Yoshida said much of that water didn’t even reach the targets.
“Even if all of the (water) had gone into the pools, the amount would have been something like 10 or 20 tons. That would be meaningless,” Yoshida said.

Japan's Nuclear Disaster: Three Years Later

It's been more than three years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in Japam. NPR's Arun Rath talks to Time Magazine East Asia correspondent Hannah Beech, who recently toured the plant.

ARUN RATH, HOST:

It's been more than three years since the earthquake and tsunami that triggered a meltdown at Japan's Fukuskima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As Time magazine's Hannah Beech reports, the country is still reckoning with the disaster. In the ongoing fight to prevent further damage, thousands of workers swaddled protective gear clock in every day at the plant operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO. Recently, Beech toured the crippled nuclear plan and witnessed the lingering devastation in the surrounding countryside.

HANNAH BEECH: There is a 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the nuclear power plant, so nobody can essentially live within that area. And it's a really surreal place to go into because as you're driving in, it's almost like a Hollywood movie. These places have been depopulated, and they're preserved in amber. You see noodle restaurants - ramen restaurants. You still see the chopsticks on the counters. And yet, it's been completely untouched since March 2011. Now, the people who live there, which is about 125,000 people - most likely, for the rest of their lives, they will never be able to go home.

RATH: You visited the control room at the plant where you saw evidence of the men that you wrote about, who were desperately trying to avert a nuclear meltdown. Can you describe that?

BEECH: Sure. I mean, just to get into the plant, it is - again, it's like a Hollywood movie. You have to put on these respirator-like gas masks, three pairs of gloves, two pairs of socks and then this, you know, weird hazmat suit that makes you look like the Michelin Man.

And what was very strange about walking into this place is that it feels - it feels completely dead. You don't see that many people moving around. And those people that you do see, there's not a palpable sense of urgency, but you realize that the work that they're doing is so important. And they may not be getting the full of backing that they should to be able to do this.

RATH: After the disaster, all the nuclear power plants in Japan were taken off-line. What is the status of nuclear power in Japan today?

BEECH: Well, yeah. So right now, 48 nuclear power plants are shuttered. The current government is now pushing to start up those nuclear power plants that can pass a higher level of kind of stringent tests. And there are a couple that look like they may potentially be able to come online soon. From the government's perspective, the costs of having stopped nuclear power have been expensive. I think the government's figure is something $35 billion a year.

And from an environmental perspective, Japan's greenhouse gas emissions have gone up because, you know, you're replacing clean nuclear with fossil fuels. At the same time, I think public opinion currently, which was relatively pro-nuclear before the accident, is quite understandably anti-nuclear at this point.

RATH: You know, there's been a lot of reporting about how unprepared TEPCO was for the disaster, in spite of what some would say was ample warning. With this push to restart the reactors, you know, is their faith from the people or assurance from the government that there are - have been enough reforms to prevent this from happening again?

BEECH: I think from the government's perspective, they said, look, we've put together new commissions, new ways of bureaucracy to be able to better regulate the power plants. But the question is, has the government been able to put in enough safeguards, to change the culture enough so that something like this can't happen again? And I don't know the answer. I think that if you look at the polls, there is still a lot of skepticism from the Japanese public as to whether that has been done.

RATH: Hannah Beech is East Asia bureau chief for Time magazine. Hannah, thank you.

BEECH: Thank you very much.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

TEPCO's Fukushima Employee's Stage Protest Against The Company

Fukushima nuclear plant workers rallied outside the headquarters of operator Tokyo Electric Power on Friday, complaining they were forced to work for meager pay in dangerous conditions.

“Workers at the Fukushima plant have been forced to do unreasonable tasks with no decent safety measures,” said one man in his 30s, who declined to give his name.
He said he was laid off after several months in the job due to heavy radiation exposure.
“Workers are forced to handle contaminated water in such grim working conditions, where any human being should not be put to work,” he said.
“They tend to make easy mistakes under the pressure, but it’s not they who are at fault—it’s the conditions that force them to do terrible tasks.”

TEPCO has lied about everything concerning its Fukushima Daiichi power plant from the beginning. From the amount of radiation leaked,  groundwater contamination, worker safety, the condition of the plant, to covering up details of radioactive leaks from the crippled power plant.

Radiation levels 18 times higher than previously reported have been found near a water storage tank at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing fresh concern about the safety of the wrecked facility.
The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), said radiation near the bottom of the tank measured 1,800 millisieverts an hour – high enough to kill an exposed person in four hours. Tepco said water levels inside the tank had not changed, indicating there had not been a leak. But the company said it had yet to discover the cause of the radiation spike.
Last month Tepco said another storage tank – of the same design as the container causing concern at the weekend – had leaked 300 tonnes of radioactive water, possibly into the sea.

TEPCO's idea of worker safety:

Six workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant have been exposed to radiation in the latest water leak in a week.
The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), said several tonnes of radioactive water had spilled from a treatment facility after one of the workers mistakenly removed a pipe.
The workers, who were wearing protective clothing and masks, came into contact with the water and were being checked for any external and internal contamination, a Tepco spokesman said.
The accident occurred on Wednesday morning as 11 workers were about to remove salt from hundreds of tonnes of water that had already been cleansed of almost all of its radioactive caesium content at another treatment facility.

Charity releases anime video to mark 2011 Japanese quake

)


The anniversary of Japan's 2011 earthquake, which saw over 15,000 people die and caused horrific damage across the country, is being marked today with the release of a short anime film raising awareness for the child victims of the disaster.

The short animated film was made by Zapuni LLC with some of Japan's most talented anime artists for the charity El Sistema Japan, which aims to transform the lives of children affected in natural disasters through music.

Set to Grammy-nominated song 'By Your Side' performed by Sade, it's hoped the film will raise awareness for the suffering of thousands of children affected by the disaster, which displaced 340,000 people in the Tōhoku region alone.

2:46 PM March 11

TEPCO May Have To Dump Radioactive Water Into Pacific Ocean

Tepco's failure to manage the buildup of contaminated water came to light last summer, when it admitted that at least 300 tonnes of tainted water were leaking into the sea every day.

I'm sure with TEPCO's nothing see or worry about here attitude what could possibly go wrong? 

A senior adviser to the operator of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has told the firm that it may have no choice but to eventually dump hundreds of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean.

Speaking to reporters who were on a rare visit to the plant on the eve of the third anniversary of the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, Dale Klein said Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco] had yet to reassure the public over the handling of water leaks that continue to frustrate efforts to clean up the site.

"The one issue that keeps me awake at night is Tepco's long-term strategy for water management," said Klein, a former chairman of the US nuclear regulatory commission who now leads Tepco's nuclear reform committee.

"Storing massive amounts of water on-site is not sustainable. A controlled release is much safer than keeping the water on-site.

"Tepco is making progress on water management but I'm not satisfied yet. It's frustrating that the company takes four or five steps forward, then two back. And every time you have a leakage it contributes to a lack of trust. There's room for improvement on all fronts."

Tepco's failure to manage the buildup of contaminated water came to light last summer, when it admitted that at least 300 tonnes of tainted water were leaking into the sea every day.

That revelation was followed by a string of incidents involving spills from poorly assembled storage tanks, prompting the government to commit about $500m (£300m) into measures to contain the water.

They include the construction of an underground frozen wall to prevent groundwater mixing with contaminated coolant water, which becomes tainted after coming into contact with melted nuclear fuel deep inside the damaged reactors.

Post-tsunami deaths due to stress, illness outnumber disaster toll in Fukushima

The March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami displaced thousands of people not just from the twin natural disasters but the subsequent meltdown of TEPCO's Daiichi-Fukushima nuclear power plant.   Given the magnitude of these 3 events the Japanese government offered huge sums of money for cleanup and rebuilding of the Tohoku area of northeast Japan but somehow these pronouncements haven't improved the lives of those affected by the disasters.  


People living in temporary housing have discovered they were poorly constructed with sloping floors, lack of funding for rebuilding,  lack of government accountability and isolation from their communities.


     Data compiled by officials and police show that almost three years after the huge waves smashed ashore, 1,656 people living in Fukushima Prefecture have died from stress and other illnesses related to the disaster, compared with 1,607 who were killed in the initial calamity.

“The biggest problem is the fact that people have been living in temporary conditions for so long,” Hiroyuki Harada, a Fukushima official dealing with victim assistance, told AFP.

“People have gone through dramatic changes of their environment. As a result, people who would not have died are dying,” he said.

Officials say that as well as those who died in the early stages of the disaster, through lack of initial care because medical facilities were hobbled, a growing number of people are dying from the physical and mental stress of staying at shelters, including through suicide.

Some families of those who have killed themselves have tried to hold plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) accountable through the legal system.

Last year, relatives of Hisashi Tarukawa won an out-of-court settlement after the 64-year-old hanged himself from a tree in a vegetable field when authorities banned the shipment of some farm produce from Fukushima.

“This is different from normal, natural disasters. People who live in shelters are forced to live there, away from their home towns and villages, where they lived for a long time,” Harada said. “They are forced to live the kinds of lives they are not used to.”

TEPCO Announces 100 Ton Leak of Radioactive Water

Since the disaster began at TEPCO's Daiichi Fukushima nuclear power plant in March of 2011 they have done nothing but lie about what damage has been done to the surrounding environment.  When power was lost at  Fukushima following being hit by a tsunami they continued to insist that the plant was operating normally which it wasn't.  They have lied about release of radioactive steam, and other leaks of contaminated water.  

A new leak of 100 tons of highly radioactive water has been discovered at Fukushima, the plant’s operator said Thursday, after it revealed only one of nine thermometers in a crippled reactor was still working.
The toxic water is no longer escaping from a storage tank on the site, said a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), adding it was likely contained, but the news is a further blow to the company’s already-battered reputation for safety.
“As there is no drainage way near the leak, which is in any case far from the ocean, it is unlikely that the water has made its way into the sea,” he said.
The tank, one of hundreds at the site that are used to store water contaminated during the process of cooling broken reactors, sits around 700 meters from the shore.
The water it contains is highly radioactive, with a beta radiation reading “at 230 million becquerel per liter,” he said.
That contamination level compares with government limits of 100 becquerels per kilogram in food and 10 becquerels per liter in drinking water. A becquerel is a unit of radioactivity

Masked artist forces Japan to think about Fukushima and radiation

Known as 281 Antinuke, Japan’s version of Banksy, has covered Tokyo streets in images depicting politicians as vampires and children being shielded from radioactive rain to highlight the consequences of a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant after an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.

“Perhaps because everyone believes people telling them on television that everything is fine, they don’t seem so worried,” 281 Antinuke told Reuters

“I hope by leaving my art I can remind people that we’re not safe at all ... and that they will do something to protect themselves.”

“The nuclear accident allowed us to realize that Japan had hidden a lot of things,” he said. “I want to make images that express doubts about what’s going on in politics - like a label that says ‘This is happening, pay attention’.”

Fukushima: animation explains how fuel rod removal will happen

A video animation by the operators of the Fukushima plant, the Tokyo Electric Company, shows how 1,534 damaged fuel rods will be removed from the site. A robotic crane will move the rods from a storage pool damaged by March 2011's earthquake and stored more securely in an on-site facility



Source: Tokyo Electric CompanyLength: 4min 41sectheguardian.com

What have we learned from Fukushima

Firstly, Fukushima was not an unavoidable natural disaster. For many outside Japan it is easy to draw the conclusion that Fukushima is unique, as very few places experience such huge earthquakes and tsunamis as Japan. So, the logic goes, there are no real lessons to be learned for other countries.

Much the same was said after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine in 1986. Chernobyl was a bad design, a similar accident could not happen in Japan, which has Western-designed reactors. But it did.

Prof Kiyoshi Kurokawa chaired the Japanese parliamentary inquiry in to the Fukushima disaster and his conclusions are devastating. It was, he told me: "Man-made, and made in Japan."

Tatsujiro Suzuki, the deputy head of Japan's Atomic Energy Commission, has also been damning.

"There were studies which showed a one-in-1,000-year probability of the Fukushima coast being hit by a 10m tsunami," he said. "Unfortunately, those studies were dismissed. The nuclear industry didn't think it would happen, so they didn't prepare for it," he said.

'Too trusting'

An investigation by Japan's NHK broadcaster last year found that simple equipment, things like mobile generators and battery packs that could have helped prevent the meltdowns, were sitting at a depot just 25 miles (40km) from the Fukushima plant.

After the tsunami knocked out the plant's electrical system there was still time to bring in the back-up equipment. Army helicopters were on standby. But there was no plan. Chaos ensued.

A senior company official in charge of logistics was asked by the NHK team why he had not dispatched the equipment. "We had a very long list of things they needed. We had no way to prioritise which should go first," he said.