The North Anna nuclear power plant, outside Richmond, Virginia, has shut down.
The plant is on the coastline, just seven miles from the epicenter of the 5.9 quake (earlier reports said it was 5.8).
Diesel generators are supplying power to basic systems at the plant.
Nine nuke plants from New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania to Maryland have declared unusual events. They have not shut down.
When orders were finally given to evacuate areas around Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, government officials led people to believe it would only be a few months.
It’s more than five months, and now the government realizes the level of contamination is so bad that it will be “…a long, long time…” before some city and towns can be considered safe for people to live in.
A meeting is being arraigned with local officials to explain the severity of the situation, and to better explain to evacuees why they might never be able to return home.
The day after the Japanese government announced it was lifting the contaminated cattle ban on Fukushima cows, four cows tested for cesium levels above safe limits.
Then, the very next day five more cows showed up with cesium contamination.
The contaminated cows had already been shipped to a slaughter house in Yokohama. It was there that the beef was found to be highly contaminated.
To make matters worse, the cow farmers swear they were not feeding the cows local rice hay, but more expensive imported hay. The imported hay had been stored indoors.
This means that the cows could be getting contaminated on their way to the slaughter house. Officials are trying to figure it out.
And yes, the Japanese government suspended the lifting of the contaminated cattle ban.
In a case of hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil, a Japanese government investigation into the corporate mind of Tokyo Electric Power Company revealed that officials just couldn’t believe the worse case scenario could happen at Fukushima Daiichi.
TEPCo officials admitted that they discussed the possibility of explosions inside the reactor buildings, but dismissed the possibility as unlikely.
Then, just one day after the 11 March 2011 quake/tsunami, Reactor 1 exploded. TEPCo officials were focused so much on other concerns, that it took the second explosion, in Reactor 3 on 14 March, to wake them up.
Some government officials conclude that Tokyo Electric officials don’t realize just how dangerous a nuclear reactor can be.
Many workers who were at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant the day of the 11 March 2011 quake and tsunami, say reactor 1 was already in trouble and possibly melting down, immediately after the 9.0 quake.
“There’s certainly a great deal of evidence that appears to suggest that the first reactor, reactor number one, was melting down by the time the tsunami hit. So, if that’s the case that the reactor was melting down as a result of the earthquake, and not as a result of the tsunami, a nine-point earthquake is something that has the potential to happen throughout Japan, and that would put the reliability and the design safety of all of these reactors in question.”-Robert Jacobs, Hiroshima Peace Institute
Also, Tokyo Electric Power Company has been reporting decreasing radiation levels coming from Pacific Ocean water inlets and outlets. It’s not a sign they have things under control, because they certainly don’t. Rather, after 5 months of ongoing nuclear disaster, what’s happened is that the remains of nuclear fuel rods have been washed out into the Pacific Ocean by TEPCo’s continued water injection.
“When you have a fragile structure that’s already suffered a great deal of damage and when you have continual aftershocks at the level of six-point, or there’s been some even higher, what we have now is we have the radioactive core that has melted down into the basement, into the bottom of the containment vessel of these reactors, and if the radiation level is going down, where it’s been monitored inside the buildings, and if the water pressure is going down, and the temperature is going down, it’s not that the radiation is just suddenly going away, it means that the radioactive material, the melted core, is simply moving further away from where it’s been measured.”-Robert Jacobs
The Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission deliberately erased all the data collected regarding the radiation contamination of children in Fukushima Prefecture!
Officials claim that since the date was public it threatened the privacy of the families!
Since the nuclear disaster following the 11 March 2011 quake and tsunami, more than 1,000 children, aged 15 or younger, were being monitored for the effects of radiation on their thyroid.
The problem is that no one else was keeping such data, and now it’s gone! The decision to delete the data is only justifying the growing lack of trust the Japanese have in their government.
Foreign Minister Takeaki Matsumoto has been working hard promoting Japanese food products to other countries, despite overwhelming evidence of radiation contamination. Now Takeaki has ordered his own ministry to stop vouching for the safety of Japanese food products.
Takeaki Matsumoto says his 1-80 is the result of increased demands for food safety information from other countries, and the fact that it’s become impossible to guarantee food being exported from Japan is safe from radiation.
This is because many of the contaminated food products sold within Japan, were discovered after they were sold to consumers.
First Tokyo Electric Power Company said there were no melt downs, as they struggled to cool the Fukushima Daiichi reactors with salty sea water. Then TEPCo admitted there were melt downs in reactors 1 and 3, but said they were contained by the water at the bottom of the containment vessels. Now an independent study says not so.
Tanabe Fumiya, an expert in nuclear safety, studied data from Reactor 3. Reactor 3 uses MOX fuel. Most of Reactor 3’s mixed uranium-plutonium oxide fuel might have made it through the containment vessel. Fumiya says on 21 March 2011 TEPCo was unable to inject water to cool the reactor. Over the next four days the fuel reheated and melted through. This explains why plutonium is being found outside the reactors.
Ever since Tokyo Electric Power Company installed a water decontamination and recirculation system, they’ve had problems after problems. Now the entire system has crashed.
The system includes filters and pumps designed in the United States and France. The idea is to decontaminate the massive amount of radioactive water flooding into the basements of the reactor buildings, then re-use that water to cool the unstable reactors.
The most common problem, in the many weeks since it’s installation, has been the fact that the decontamination part is not working well, the radiation levels are not being reduced to a level TEPCo would like (this is another proof that radiation levels coming out of the reactors are much higher than TEPCo would like to admit).
The next most common problem is that pumps keep failing. This time all the pumps have failed, including the back up pumps.
Beginning Thursday, 04 August 2011, pumps began failing. By Saturday, 06 August, all the pumps were down. As usual TEPCo does not know why, and is investigation to find out why!!!
TEPCo is planning on hooking up a Japanese designed filters and pumps to the system, as if that’s the solution.
Now that it’s become clear that most of Japan’s upcoming rice harvests are most likely to be contaminated with cesium, Japanese are holding onto last years rice like it was gold.
Japanese retailers are reporting that bags of last year’s rice are flying off the shelves, because consumers don’t think there will be any rice available from this year’s harvests.
The Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry says it’s working to ensure the safety of this year’s rice harvests. But so far the government has a real bad track record of proving their incompetence regarding nuclear contamination.
Lack of rice in Japan, yet another notch in the tightening belt of the global food crisis.