The Pakistan government announced that they are picking up trace amounts of iodine-131, form Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Iran, a neighbor of Pakistan, says it has started to inspect aircraft coming from Japan, for radiation contamination.
Sharp has announced that production of their Liquid Crystal Display TVs will be halted, due to parts shortages in Japan, due to the ongoing disasters.
Sharp is not too worried as they say they still have a one months supply of parts on hand.
The recent huge aftershock, in Japan, has resulted in one thousand ATMs being shut down.
Japan Post Bank blames it on the power outage caused by a big aftershock on April 7. The power outage caused a computer glitch that shut down the Automated Teller Machines.
On 09 April 2011, fish samples off Japan were found still contaminated with cesium.
On 07 April 2011, one in four fish samples had levels of contamination above set limits.
The fish tested were lance fish, and two kinds of flat fish.
People of Japan have been driving into the 20km evacuation zone, violating their government’s orders. It’s all because so many people being affected feel they are not being told what is really going on with their homes and animals they left behind. I have links to 2 videos people should watch.
In a 12 minute video journalists enter the area, find packs of dogs, and surprisingly, people driving around.
At the 17km point their Geiger counter alarm goes off. They then pass armored semi-trucks with the drivers wearing gas masks. At 15km the radiation levels go up. They are then stopped by massive quake damage to the road. Driving down another road they come across cattle eating radioactive grass. More earthquake damaged road. We’re only four minutes into the video. Driving through seemingly abandoned cities with quake damaged buildings. Another car with people wearing surgical masks. Tsunami damage. Geiger counters still sounding the alarm. Seven and a half minutes into the video Fukushima DaiNi nuclear plant. Someone’s vegetable garden. At 2.5km radiation spike. A lone dog, they feed it. At 1.8km radiation increases. Cattle loose in the town. 11 and a half minutes in Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. 112 micro sieverts per hour on their counter, 1.5km from plant. This means radiation sickness will show up after 92 days, if you stay. Could be cesium.
There is a 10 minute video where they go right up to the Fukushima Daiichi gates.
They actually walk around the destruction taking Geiger counter readings. They pass road repair crews wearing full contamination suits, how’d you like to patch pot holes dressed like that. Just like the other guys, the Geiger counter goes up the closer they get to the nuke plant. At 1.5km from Fukushima Daiichi their counter goes into the yellow zone. At the gate they are waved off by people in full nuke suits. They drive around the perimeter of the nuke plant, their Geiger counter staying in the yellow zone. At one point it goes over 100 micro sieverts per hour. This video ends with a trip to Chernobyl, in Ukraine, in which they demonstrate that even 25 years later everything there is still radioactive, and, that people are still dealing with genetic mutations in their children (it begins with the scenes of snow and old Soviet tanks).
And the Japanese government wants the media to stop “sensationalizing”? Video’s speak louder than words, Baka!
The trucks are made by a German company, Putzmeister, for building skyscrapers. The Soviets also used eleven of them to help dump concrete on the failed Chernobyl nuclear plant about 25 years ago.
The 26 wheeled trucks can be operated by remote control. You know the situation at Fukushima Daiichi is bad when so many other countries get directly involved to help control the crisis.
Thanks to the nuclear crisis, rice planting has been banned in Japan.
The problem is that the areas directly affected by the 11 March 2011 quake, actually sunk. Add to that the tsunami destroyed the sea walls. Now high tides have been flooding the land with ocean water contaminated with cesium-137 (as I warned in an earlier posting). There is also airborne cesium being detected, falling onto the ground.
The Japanese government will now test farm soils for cesium contamination. Any farm found to have cesium will be banned from planting. Cesium contamination is why Chernobyl city is still uninhabitable almost 30 years after that nuclear accident in Soviet Ukraine.
Rice planting normally begins by May. Rice is important to Japan: 8.5 million tons of rice were produced in 2010, and almost all of it stayed in Japan. The current situation will now make Japan dependent on foreign sources of rice.
Cesium is still found in soil in Germany, Austria and France 25 years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Chernobyl is 1,160 kilometers (720 miles) from Germany.
Tokyo Electric Power Company says workers are now building a steel fence around the water inlets and outlets of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
They are attempting to block highly radioactive isotopes from getting out into the currents of the Pacific Ocean. They are also using silt fences.
One report says the steel fences are seven steel sheets thick, and the fence will cover an area 120 meters (393 feet) wide.
Recently officials admitted that radiation reports were faulty because the radiation levels are so high that monitoring devices are basically wigging out, and unable to give accurate readings. They stopped short of saying the levels are so high that they peg their meters.
They are hoping to use a UAV (drone) to monitor levels over the plant. It depends on the weather, unmanned aerial vehicles need good weather to fly.
I’ve been checking the Idaho RadNet web site and have gotten frustrated because it’s become clear Idaho DEQ is not updating the site. I checked it today, 08 April 2011, @ 11:00AM Mountain Time, and the RadNet posting is still for 06 April 2011.
Recently the Associated Press reported how the RadNet monitors are not reliable.
On top of the Idaho RadNet web site not being updated, the text portion seems to be the same as it was last week, or, Idaho is still getting hit with iodine-131 and xenon-133.
The numbers that RadNet posts are in Beta counts per minute, which is how a Geiger counter reads. The problem, reveled by University of California Santa Cruz professor, Daniel Hirsch, is that there are no set universal standards regarding how much radiation exposure is “bad”.
One source says they consider 100 counts per minute as “bad”. Well, if you look at the Idaho RadNet web site, you’ll see counts as high as 300. However, if you try to use the RadNet web site explainer pages, to figure out if you’re safe or not, you only get more confused.
“The monitoring system isn’t functioning fully.”-Daniel Hirsch, University of California Santa Cruz
Hirsch said that EPA is too slow in releasing data about the radiation from the nuclear accident in Japan. Some RadNet monitoring systems have been offline for months.
The Associated Press, quoting the Environmental Protection Agency’s own website, said as many as 20 of the RadNet sites were down. Also, 38% were under “review”. When a RadNet site is under review, it means that the officials are doubting the readings.
Daniel Hirsch pointed out that radiation exposure standards from one government agency to another are different, which adds to the problem of letting people know if they are at risk or not. It also explains why some “experts” disagree with other “experts” about the dangers from Japan. There is no set standard for radiation exposure!
This explains a lot of the confusion in Japan during the first two weeks of the nuclear disaster. I remember watching press conferences where it seemed officials from one agency contradicted officials from another agency. You’d think when it comes to nuclear power there would be a set universal standard regarding radiation exposure!