Tag Archives: health

Fukushima

Government Incompetence: Japan announced beef was safe to eat, then once again, more cesium contaminated cows!

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.

International

Obama wants troops to stay in Afghanistan until 2024, Russia says it doesn’t make sense

Afghan officials have told British media that the U.S. and Afghanistan have agreed to keep thousands of U.S. troops in country until 2024!

The deal would allow U.S. forces to use Afghan military bases, provide facilities to store massive numbers of U.S. military equipment, and allow thousands of military personnel to stay, including special forces.

Russian officials pointed out that the deal doesn’t make sense: “If the job is done, if terrorism is defeated and peace and stability is brought back, then why would you need bases?  If the job is not done, then several thousand troops, even special forces, will not be able to do the job that 150,000 troops couldn’t do.  It is not possible.”-Andrey Avetisyan, Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan

The Russians should know, they got their butts kicked by the Afghans back when Russia was part of the Soviet Union.  They did exactly what the U.S. is doing now, trying to train up the Afghan government to take on the “terrorists”.  The Soviet Union left Afghanistan in 1989, but continued to supply weapons and trainers to the Afghan government.  The Afghan government lasted until 1992, brought down by a civil war that lasted until 1996.  The civil war ended in 1996 when the Taliban took control of the country.

Fukushima

Corporate Incompetence: TEPCo knew explosion could occur, but just didn’t want to believe that it would!

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.

Fukushima

Corporate Incompetence: Nuclear Plant workers say Reactor 1 was already melting down even before the Tsunami hit, decreasing radiation levels due to fuel rods being washed away

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

 

Fukushima

Government Incompetence: Agency deliberately erased human radiation contaminaton data!

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.

Fukushima

Government Incompentence: Japanese official does 1-80, stops promoting Japanese food, now says no guarantee it’s safe to eat

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.

Fukushima

Corporate Incompetence: Reactor 3 melt down actually breached containment vessel, plutonium contamination!

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.

Fukushima, Technology

Corporate Incompetence: Fukushima Daiichi water decontamination system crashes!

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.

Fukushima

Government Incompetence: Rice becomes the new Gold in Japan, add another notch to the tightening famine belt

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.

Fukushima

Government Corruption: Japanese officials “fixed” public hearings on nuclear energy with fake supporters from the utility companies

The recent announcement that three top government officials will lose their jobs, comes after weeks of blame games between the Japanese nuclear agencies and the nuclear power utility companies.  The issue is that many weeks ago it was revealed that public hearings to determine if the Japanese people wanted nuclear power, were fixed to make it look like there was strong support of nuclear power.

Initially the utility companies were blamed, because it was their employees, and subcontractors that flooded the public hearings with support for nuclear energy. Now it turns out that the utility companies were ordered to do so by the very government agencies that were supposed to be regulating them.

05 August 2011, the Minister of the Economy, Trade, and Industry Ministry, Banri Kaieda, announced an investigation into the actions of the three top officials who were effectively fired the day before.

Specifically, a third party will investigate the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.  That agency was the one who set up the public hearings, and, according to several electric power companies, ordered the utilities to flood the hearings with supporters of nuclear power.  The Japanese media is calling this a case of “influence peddling” on the part of the government.