TEPCo president Shimizu Masataka, 66, became sick on 16 March and took a week off.
Officials say he was in bed most of the time. TEPCo runs the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Now he is back at work in the at the TEPCo liaison office. Despite that claim by TEPCo officials, Shimizu still has not been seen in public.
“This is the biggest impact ever in the history of the automobile industry.”-Koji Endo, Advanced Research Japan
Parts, from electronics, to mechanical parts for cars, to paint pigments, are shipped by slow boat. That means that the U.S., Europe and other parts of Asia have NOT begun to feel the true impact of the Japanese shut down.
Warehouses in Japan are almost out of the parts they had on hand at the time of the March 11 earthquake/tsunami, and the ongoing nuclear power plant disaster. Since then, Japanese factories have had trouble after trouble trying to get their factories restarted.
The United States, Europe and the rest of Asia can expect the full impact of Japan’s shut down to begin in April.
Many factories in Japan are without power to operate. Some factories have lost employees to the disaster.
This disaster in Japan reveals the weakness of a truly global economy. If one part of the chain breaks, it’s in trouble. It should be viewed more like dominoes, if one domino falls, others will be brought down with it. Japan has become the trigger domino, because it has basically become the parts supplier to the world.
Here’s why this is so bad for the worldwide auto industry: About 3,000 parts can go into one car. Those parts come from dozens of factories, and most are in Japan. But it gets worse, some of the “parts” are made up of many tiny parts. And, you guessed it, those tiny parts also come from dozens of other factories. It’s a friggin’ logistical nightmare, it’s a wounder the auto industry didn’t collapse because of parts supply issue sooner!
It’s not just cars. Get ready to see shortages of computers, video game systems, printer ink and even batteries. So much for a global economy! Can you say idiot in Japanese? It’s Baka!
Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio, stated that no one should enter the 20km (12.4 miles) evacuation zone around Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
The reason; high radiation contamination. The situation has gotten much worse now that it looks like partial melt down of reactor cores. Reactor 2 is thought to have experienced partial melt down.
TEPCo officials now admitting that the cause of the high radiation, and the leaking of deadly water into the turbine rooms, might be the result of fuel rods in the reactors melting. The deadly water has been found in reactors 1, 2, 3 & 4 turbine rooms.
Specifically it is believed reactor 2 is at least in partial melt down. Cabinet Secretary, Edano Yukio, said the partial melt down was temporary.
Those people who voluntarily evacuated are being told, that for now, they can not return to their homes.
NHK reporting that turbine rooms for reactors 1, 2 and 3 are flooding with radioactive water.
TEPCo now says they will have to try to hook up separate power sources to each reactor. The single power source they’ve been trying to hook up isn’t working out. They are waiting for new generators.
TEPCo now asking for Boric Acid. I’m wondering what happened to the Boric Acid that was sent from California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, via the USAF.
TEPCo will switch to fresh water to cool spent fuel rod pools, on March 29. Sea water is still being used.
TEPCo trying to pump water from turbine room condensers into storage tanks. When that is done they can pump the deadly water in the basements of the reactors into the condensers.
Officials from Nevada, California, Hawaii, Colorado, Massachusetts and Washington state, are reporting small levels of radiation that can be traced to Japan have been detected.
Iceland officials are reporting the same thing.
A monitoring station near the Las Vegas Atomic Testing Museum, reported iodine-131 and xenon-133. University of Nevada reported cesium-137 between March 17 and 21.
Public health officials in Massachusetts detected iodine-131 in rain water. Officials in California and Washington state also confirm iodine-131 in rain.
In Iceland officials say that, so far, the radiation levels detected there are less than after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. They made that statement on March 23. Now there is evidence that plutonium is leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
How many nuclear power plants in the north east of Honshu? I counted three. The importance is that the area continues to get hit with quakes, and small tsunamis.
Miyagi Prefecture has one nuclear plant, Onagawa, with three reactors.
Fukushima Prefecture has two pants, Daiichi & DaiNi. Daiichi has six reactors, DaiNi has four reactors. Daiichi is the plant that is about to make Chernobyl look good.
Aomori Prefecture had a nuclear plant under construction, but Tokyo Electric ceased construction because of the disaster at Daiichi.
Tokyo Electric Power Company runs the Fukushima plants. Oganawa is run by Tohoku Electric Power Company. Both could be called TEPCo, but they are different companies.
“I think maybe the situation is much more serious than we were led to believe. This is far beyond what one nation can handle – it needs to be bumped up to the UN Security Council. In my humble opinion, this is more important than the Libya no fly zone.” -Meshkati Najmedin, of the University of Southern California
Meshkati is correct! Tokyo Electric Power Company now says they can not resume attempts to cool the reactors, due to “…high radiation density..”.
“Regrettably, we don’t have a concrete schedule at the moment to enable us to say in how many months or years (the crisis will be over).”-Muto Sakae, TEPCo vice-president
What’s the problem now? The reactor cores are leaking, the water is deadly radioactive, no one can work around the reactors. TEPCo officials thought they could pump the deadly water into the condenser units, but guess what? They’re already full of water! They can’t just dump the deadly water because it’s so deadly. That’s why they were hoping to pump it into the condenser units. I guess they forgot they in use before the 11 March 2011 disaster. Now they want to try to dump the water already in the condensers and then pump the deadly water into the condensers. But this is now a race against time. The longer this takes the more contamination, including plutonium, is spread, through the air and water. Also, this could lead to full melt down of three reactors, worse than Chernobyl.
Guess what long term solution is being proposed? Dump sand and concrete on the SOB! And that’s a long term solution.
TEPCo has asked another company to check soil samples for plutonium. Plutonium is created when the uranium fuel rods are “jolted” during the fission process. If reactor cores are breached, which many “experts” now believe, then plutonium should be detected outside the reactors.
Plutonium is bad. Depending on the type of plutonium isotope, the half life can range from 14 years to 80 million years!
As Bill Nye said in a CNN interview last week, all they can do now is dump concrete on the reactors.
Here’s more proof that corporations are idiots: TEPCo has not been able to detect plutonium, so they are contracting with another company to do the test. The test will take several days, according to Japanese media reports. Several days? When your dealing with plutonium you need to know yesterday!
TEPCo now says it will check soil twice a week for plutonium. NOW? Why not from the beginning of the disaster you idiots! Plutonium is present in spent fuel rods, and three of the spent fuel pools blew up, remember? That means plutonium was spread all over during the first week!
TEPCo says it will conduct another test of the leaked water at Fukushima Daiichi, reactor 2’s turbine building. The reading for iodine-134 (has a shorter half life than iodine-131) announced earlier was actually for another isotope that has a longer half-life.
TEPCo officials say the level of 10 million times more than normal is incorrect, but the radiation levels being emitted are still 1,000 millisieverts (1 million microsieverts) per hour! If the radiation is from an isotope with a longer half life than iodine-134, that still makes it real bad.
Can’t these corporate buffoons get anything right?