31 January 2014 (12:34 UTC-07 Tango)/29 Rabi ‘al-Awwal 1435/11 Bahman 1392/01 Yi-Chou (1st month) 4712 (Happy New Year!)
Residents of Shiga Prefecture have filed a criminal complaint against TEPCo, for illegally dumping nuclear waste! One of those residents is a former professor of environmental toxicology at Kyoto University. The dumping was carried out by contractors and subcontractors, who wantonly dumped cesium contaminated lumber into a river and even on private property, between March and April 2013!!!
Officials at Fukushima Daiichi say they will try using apatite filters to try an capture the strontium-90 that’s still pouring into the groundwater. Apatite is used at the Hanford disaster site in Washington, United States.
Japanese officials say Hanford officials told them the apatite filter absorbs 90% of strontium.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported to Congress on the results of their investigation into the U.S. nuke industry. The investigation was spurred by the ongoing Fukushima Daiichi disaster. The NRC said U.S. nuclear power plants are lacking emergency plans to deal with long term power outages and need to be upgraded to handle natural disasters!
Japan’s NHK (Nippon Housou Kyoukai/Japan Broadcasting Corporation) told a longtime radio host to stop making negative comments about nuclear power. The radio host is also a economics professor at Tokyo University.
Nakakita Toru quit in protest after being told his reports could influence “voting behavior”!
There are a couple of factors here. One: NHK has a new pro-government/pro-nuke manager. To give you an idea of how loopy this guy is, Momii Katsuto recently stated that all waring parties (during the Second World War) employed official government paid prostitutes! Japan was the only country that did so (calling them Comfort Women), and now he has been forced to apologize for his totally ignorant comment. But he didn’t exactly apologize, he said his comment was his personal opinion, not the official opinion of NHK.
Two: The Japanese government recently created a state-secrets law. Critics say it targets the news media. One poll showed that 61% of Japanese consider the state-secrets law “problematic”.
Tokyo Electric Power Company is reporting a record $7.54-billion USD in profits, just for the months of April through December! However, they admit it’s a result of jacking up electricity rates for customers and the massive taxpayer bailout!