More problems for Tokyo Electric Power Company. Another one of their nuke plants, in Niigata Prefecture, started smoking. The smoke came from a control panel.
The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant is located on the west side of Honshu, opposite where the 11 March 2011, 9.0 quake hit.
TEPCo officials say the control panel started smoking when they were checking water purification equipment. At this point, they don’t know why.
The K-Max has been offered to help remove spent fuel rods from damaged fuel pools at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The helicopter is remote controlled.
The helicopter will help set up large cranes, that will be used to remove the fuel rods.
The offer was made by Admiral Robert Willard, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, in late March.
“Mr. Maliki rejected Gates’ demand, saying that Iraq will deal with the issue based on the security pact (signed between Washington and Baghdad).”-Ali al-Dabbagh, Iraqi Government Spokesman
Iraqi officials say they did not ask the United States to keep troops past the 2011 withdraw date, in fact they say U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates “demanded” that U.S. troops stay. According to Iraqis Gates made the demand directly to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
On April 7, Gates went to Iraq and made comments to U.S. troops that made it sound like the Iraqis wanted U.S. forces to stay. Gates even made it sound like the Iraqis needed to hurry up and decide: “If folks here are going to want us to have a presence, we’re going to need to get on with it pretty quickly in terms of our planning.”
Iraqi officials now say that Gates’ visit was solely to push them to ask for the U.S. troops to stay. There are reports that Kurds in northern Iraq asked U.S. forces to stay, but under the current U.S. security pact with Iraq, only the Iraqi parliament can ask U.S. forces to stay. Even Kurdish officials agree with that: “It is not related to Iraq’s Kurdish officials and they have no role in the US forces’ stay or exit. It is up to the central government to decide on the issue.”-Sabah Barzandi, member of the parliament of Iraq’s Kurdistan region
Since Robert Gates made his statements, Iraqis have been demonstrating against the U.S., and direct attacks on U.S. bases have increased. Today, April 16, thousands of Iraqis protested in Baghdad. There were so many that officials had to open up sports stadiums to the protesters: “We have specified Al-Shaab, Kashafa and Zawraa stadiums as permitted sites for demonstrations in Baghdad…”-Major General Qassim Atta
The German government announced that they will end the use of nuclear power plants as soon as possible.
Germany is prepared to spend the money necessary to make renewable clean energy sources their main power supply by 2020. Germany will keep its coal and natural gas fire electrical plants in operation.
“Just pointing a measuring device at your food before dinner is pretty much meaningless.”-Katayama Atsushi, Japan Society for Analytical Chemistry.
The Japanese Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry says you should use scintillation counters to detect iodine-131 in milk and vegetables. Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometers should be used to trace uranium. Nitric acid and dehydrated samples are turned to ash over a 24-hour period in temperatures exceeding 400 degrees Celsius, in order to detect strontium.
“Just to know what the radiation levels are in your home, it’s relatively straightforward, but when you get to measuring it in food, milk and soil it gets much more complicated.”-Joseph Rotunda, Thermo Fisher Scientific
You could spend $400.00 on a Geiger counter just to measure radiation in and around your home, but lots of things can affect the reading. Things like concrete walls and driveways, granite counter tops and even cell phones.
To save some money, if you don’t think it’s safe to eat, don’t eat it.
“As (Toyota) continues to address its production situation in Japan following the disaster, it has decided that vehicle production from May 10 to June 3 will proceed at approximately 50 percent of normal.”-company statement
Basically the situation for “key component suppliers” (parts makers) is still too unreliable to resume full production.
Toyota says it will continue to evaluate the situation, and make the necessary adjustments to production.
8 employees were fired, and 25 had their pay cut by 30%, for not paying for tickets on their own monorail service.
JR East Tokyo Monorail, says most of the employees were in management positions. They would board the train for work, swipe their pay cards, then once at work, would use the company computers to delete the charge.
One employee almost got away with 590,000 yen worth of fares. Unpaid fares have cost JR East over 1.2 million yen.
Tokyo Electric Power Company can not keep up with the amount of contaminated water coming from their Fukushima Daiichi reactors. So far they’ve removed 660 tons of water, but the reactors and fuel pools hold more than 80,000 tons combined, and the water continues to pour out.
Water levels in the tunnel connected to Reactor 2 has risen to a point higher than before they started removing the water. They still aren’t sure where the water is coming from, but suspect damaged reactor vessels.
On top of that they’re now saying the radiation levels in the contaminated water are maxed out (they used a term similar to that). As of 15 April, the radiation levels in the leaked water are now 38 times what they were last week. TEPCo also thinks the contamination is getting into the groundwater, not just the Pacific Ocean.
It turns out that TEPCo was testing radiation levels, in the leaked water, only once per week! They say they will now test three times per week.
The high radiation indicates that not only could reactor vessels be damaged, but fuel rods have melted.
TEPCo says they won’t be able to transfer recovered water, to a waste plant, until the end of next week.
The Geographical Survey Institute surveyed 28 benchmarks in three prefectures, hit by the 11 March earthquake.
They confirmed that the land has dropped as much as 84cm (33 inches, just under 3 feet).
The land sunk in Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures. They are now dealing with high tide flooding caused by the loss of their sea walls, and their sunken land.
Tokyo Electric Power Company will try a new weapon against radiation spreading in the Pacific Ocean; sandbags. They already tried steel and silt fencing, now they will use sandbags full of zeolite.
Zeolite is an aluminosilicate mineral, used in commercial absorbents. It’s hoped it will absorb some of the high levels of radiation in the water.
The difficulties never stop. Now analysis by the Atomic Energy Society says fuel rods have melted in reactors 1 and 3. The rods dropped small pellets into the cooling water as they melted. The pellets have built up at the bottom of the vessel. There is concern that a large buildup of melted fuel could become a molten mass and damage the vessel, leaking huge amounts of radioactive material.
One evidence of damaged vessels is plutonium. For the third time plutonium contamination has been found around Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.