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 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?

TEPCo said radiation 10 million times the normal level was detected in water that leaked into Reactor 2’s turbine housing unit!

Workers were struggling to pump out water, but had to evacuate because of the high radiation levels.

Cabinet Secretary, Edano Yuki, announced that national police are being sent in to 20-30km evacuation/disaster zones.

Edano said that radiation levels are so high at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that work must be halted until the contamination can be removed. Soil samples around the area show rapidly increasing radiation contamination.

Japanese government will now evacuate those who want to voluntarily evacuate, but don’t have the means to do so. The national police will try to contact people who are still in the zones that have been designated “stay indoors” zones.  All options open.

Medical teams from around the world are now being sent into the zones.

Japanese government expects more “difficulties”.  Japanese government admitting that financing for any recovery from the nuclear disaster will be a problem.