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There is a heavy steam event taking place at Fukshima reactor building 4 at this very moment!
The livecam closest to the reactor building 4 is the only one that display the steam event taking place. The JNN livecam is currently offline showing a "green screen" and the Futaba traffic cam is not picking up anything. And the other livecam showing reactor buildings 1 and 2 does not pick up anything but a little bit of the ongoing radioactive releases.
The forecast for the next few days and weeks for people living in the Northern Hemisphere will be radioactive rain with a tad of sunshine and airborne radiation.
And remember scientists say one medium banana packs about 422 milligrams of potassium, about 11 percent of the 4,700 milligrams adults should aim to get daily. So don't go eating any bananas this week, the added potassium could kill you! That will be all for today's radioactive news.
Fukushima Steam Events Aug 3, 2014 Radioactive Releases
Some of you who have been keeping an eye on Fukushima and the Live Cam they have, might have noticed that yesterday Tepco changed the angle of the camera. It's now located at the opposite side from where it was before with reactor unit 4 closest in view to the camera instead of unit 1.
I've been busy with other things lately so I didn't notice the work that was going on top of reactor unit 4. FC pointed out in the chat that there was flashes going on in the bottom right corner of the screen, and sure enough when I looked at the live cam there was even workers moving around there.
Here you can see an ILLUSTRATION showing the location where the welding work is being done on top of reactor unit 4. The actual flashes where much smaller than this illustration shows but the scale of the workers to the right is about the same.
I figure the flashes was caused by the workers welding some beams, that's what it looks like to me. I tell you they better weld in some support because that 60 Ton "cover" they put in place a month ago on top of the fuel pool to an already damaged structure is not going to help the building situation.
I'm sure you already have read about what happens when that fuel pool hits the ground in the event of an bigger earthquake. The contamination released would equate to some 800-1000 nuclear weapons going off all at once.
And I hope those workers where wearing gas masks because that steel is
contaminated with all kinds of radioactive particles, welding always
cause smoke and people doing it for a living need regular health
checkups to check their lungs.. Add radiation to that smoke and it is not going to turn out good for the workers later on.
Now the camera angle like I told you earlier is different now from what it was when the livecam first was put into place 2011. But we can still see all the reactor units and cranes working on the site. To explain the map, Unit 4 is in the right corner of the screen and we can see part of Unit 1 way back with Unit 2 blocking most of the view (Unit 1 is the white reactor unit because of the tent they put up).
I hope this Fukushima update have shed some light on the recent developments on site.
Arnie Gundersen came out with a new video talking about the danger of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 and it's Spent Fuel Pool. I am sure that the most of you have already heard that if / when Unit 4 collapses it will bring on the evacuation of Tokyo and probably all of Japan as we know it. The reason why this is so, is that in the Fuel Pool at Unit 4 the combined amount of old and new Fuel Rods stored there are so great that if the rods hit the ground and they will catch fire, they will spew out more Cesium 137 than all the Atomic Bomb test's that have been done in the entire history of mankind. Try and imagine this, only if we were detonate 800 Nuclear Bombs at Fukushima we would achieve the same level of contamination.
Arnie say something very important in the beginning of this video, he talks about that once the rods catch fire they can't be put out anymore. And no amount of water will extinguish the flame, in fact water would make it worse!! And they will continue to burn. This would become an even bigger ongoing contamination of the entire world, but to make matters even worse it would be impossible to stop.
When I see these things happening to Japan and think about their past I can't shake the feeling how all this have changed their culture. After WW2 with the destruction caused by nuclear weapons on the Japanese people, this was the first use of Atomic Bombs and no one had ever seen anything like it. The destruction, the defeat was so great their culture changed. Their way of thinking and looking at the world changed.
Have you ever seen young boys and girls that are from war zones paint? They don't draw happy images, their imagination most of the time goes to something much more darker than other kids.
This can be clearly seen if you watch some Japanese Movies. Godzilla comes to mind, the big creature that comes up from the sea and destroys everything in it's path. It's very different from Hollywood if you start to think about it. But it all works out in the end.. Somehow.. But this time, I'm not so sure..
OK back to the video. For you that can't watch the video below is the transcription for you to read, I included pictures from the video also. And you can also watch this video on the Fairewinds site along with the transcript.
Transcribed - The Truth and the Future -
Maggie Gundersen: Hello Mr. Hirose and hello people of Kansai. I am Maggie Gundersen. I am the President and the founder of Fairewinds Associates and the founding director of Fairewinds Energy Education non-profit.
I am here today with Arnie Gundersen, my husband, and Chief Engineer for Fairewinds Associates. We are here today to talk to you about the triple meltdown at Fukushima-Daiichi. We hope to answer all your questions. I wish we could have joined you in person, but I thank you for watching this video and please send us any follow-up questions. We will be happy to answer them. Now let's bring Arnie into this conversation. Arnie, how dangerous is the situation now at Fukushima-Daiichi Unit 4, particularly in Japan with its continuous danger of earthquakes and seismic activity and chance for an additional tsunami.
Arnie Gundersen: Unit 4 has always been my biggest concern. If you watched our website on the very first week of the accident I was saying that if Unit 4 were to catch fire, you would have to evacuate Tokyo. As a matter of fact the book that we wrote talks about that a lot. It is really important and it remains the biggest concern that I have about the Fukushima site. Unit 4 has more fuel in it than any of the other units in the complex, but more importantly it has the most recently used nuclear fuel. And all of that fuel is outside of the containment. So that would make it dangerous enough. Except that also, of course, Unit 4 has had a series of explosions and is weakened structurally. Before it might have withstood a 7.5 earthquake. I believe that the structural damage to Unit 4 is so great that if there is a 7.5 earthquake, it will not withstand it.
Here is what would happen if Unit 4 were to crack and the water were to drain out of the nuclear fuel pool. The fuel is hot enough that it needs to be water-cooled.If air is all there is cooling the fuel, it will burn. It will burn the zircaloy cladding on the fuel, (and) will react with the oxygen to create a fire. And it is a fire that once it starts, cannot be put out by water. Water would make it worse. So the nuclear fuel would have to burn completely before the fire would ever go out.
In the process, all that radiation would go up into the atmosphere and blow all over Japan and all over the world.
There is as much cesium in the fuel pool at Unit 4 as there was in all of the atomic bombs dropped in all of the tests in the 1940's, the 1950's, the 1960's, and into the 1970's. All of the above ground testing has less cesium in it than is in the reactor pool at Fukushima 4 right now. So it is a grave situation. I don't believe that the Japanese Government is moving fast enough. If there is no earthquake, the plan to remove the fuel slowly is going to be adequate. But we cannot wait on Mother Nature. We have to quickly move that fuel out of that pool and onto the ground. The key here is quickly. The Japanese Government finally just this month came up with a plan to build a building around the fuel pool building and begin removing the fuel in 2013 or 2014.
I said that that is what they needed to do on the Fairewinds site in an interview with Chris Martenson a year ago. These things have been evident, but TEPCO is not moving fast enough and the Japanese Government is not pushing TEPCO to move fast enough either. I think the top priority of TEPCO and the top priority of the Japanese Government should be to move the fuel out of that pool just as quickly as possible. And in the meantime, they need to strengthen that pool to make sure that it can withstand an earthquake. Remember, that pool is not in a containment. You can look down in a satellite and see the nuclear fuel. The roof is blown off. And that is what makes it dangerous.
In America, we had the Brookhaven National Laboratory do a study to examine what would happen in a fuel pool fire. Brookhaven National Labs determined that there would be 187,000 people who would develop cancer from a fuel pool fire. It is a serious concern and I do not believe that Tokyo Electric and I do not believe that the Japanese Government is taking it seriously enough. For the last year I have been working with Akio Matsumora and finally it appears that the world community is listening to Akio Matsumora's concerns about the pool. We need to tackle this as a concerned world community and encourage the Japanese Government and encourage Tokyo Electric to solve it quickly.
Maggie Gundersen: Arnie you mentioned cesium in your earlier discussion. Why is it important? What is the health effect of cesium and are there any other radioactive isotopes that would have been released during the triple meltdown?
Arnie Gundersen:Cesium is one of many radioactive isotopes that are created in a nuclear reactor. It has got a 30 year half life which means that it hangs around for 300 years and biologically it mimics potassium. You might remember that if you have a muscle cramp, you eat a banana and it goes to your muscles and relieves the cramp. Well, cesium also goes to your muscles. It is called a muscle seeker. When it goes to your muscles, it can cause cancer, but it can also cause a variety of other illnesses.
The Brookhaven study only looks at cancer. It does not look at all the other things that radioactive cesium can do. In young children with rapidly developing muscles, especially their heart muscle, it can create something called Chernobyl Heart which is damage to the heart muscle, which once it is damaged, never ever recovers for the life of the child. So cesium is just one of many isotopes, but it is relatively easy to measure and also biologically causes almost the most damage of any of the other isotopes that are in that reactor.
Maggie Gundersen: Arnie, you have said that you believe the explosion at Unit 3 was a prompt criticality. What is a prompt criticality and why do you believe that?
Arnie Gundersen: I developed my concern about a prompt criticality because of the nature of the explosion in Unit 3. Unit 1, when it exploded, blew sideways and with relatively low energy. You can measure the rate at which it moves and it moves less than the speed of sound. And that is called a deflagration. It does not do anywhere near as much damage. When I looked at the explosion on Unit 3, however, it was entirely different. You can see it, it is not hard to see. It is called a detonation. The speed at which Unit 3 exploded was faster than the speed of sound. And the important thing is not how Unit 3 exploded. What is the most important thing is that it exploded with a detonation, not a deflagration. The nuclear industry is not paying attention to this now, but it should be, because a nuclear containment can handle the slow moving deflagration, but it cannot handle the fast moving detonation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the international community are absolutely ignoring the fact that a detonation occurred in Unit 3.
Well how did a detonation occur? That was the question I asked myself. I checked with chemists and atmospheric pressure and hydrogen will not create a detonation. Like on Unit 1 it will only create a deflagration. So I needed to figure out how a detonation could occur. But there are a couple of other clues here. One clue is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission way back in March of last year, wrote a report that is on our website, that talks about nuclear fuel being deposited on the site and nuclear fuel being discovered as far away as two kilometers.
How can nuclear fuel get blown out of a nuclear reactor? The fuel that is inside the reactor is also inside the containment and there is no indication of a massive containment failure and a massive reactor failure that could have thrown the nuclear fuel out. So I had to come up with a reason that the nuclear fuel could have been released in pieces, not little fine atoms, but in pieces which is what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says was discovered.
The only way that could happen is if the explosion occurred in the fuel pool at Unit 3. Now if you look at the video of Unit 3, the very first frames show the explosion occurring on the side of the building and that is the side of the building that has the nuclear fuel pool. It started on the nuclear fuel pool side and then worked it's way up into the massive cloud that you see. So what could have caused that? That is the question. Hydrogen would have been above the nuclear fuel, it would have been a gas above the nuclear fuel and if it had exploded, it would have pushed the nuclear fuel down.
That is not what happened. Remember, we have fuel fragments found off-site. Something had to lift the nuclear fuel up. The only thing I could determine is that it was a criticality in the fuel pool that caused the fuel to lift up. The division I ran built nuclear fuel racks for boiling water reactors exactly like Fukushima. The dense fuel racks that are now in every reactor everywhere are very close to becoming critical anyway. And in the accident situation where there was seismic event and explosions occurring, it is likely that they were very near to becoming critical. And what that means is that they were very near to becoming a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
Way back in college 40 years ago, we watched a movie called the Borax Experiment. You can find it on the web today. The explosion at Borax was a prompt moderated criticality. It looks almost exactly like the explosion in Fukushima unit 3. So an image I had from 40 years ago led me to conclude that the same thing happened in Unit 3. That a criticality occurred in the fuel pool and it pushed some of the nuclear fuel up into pellets and the pellets wound up scattered around the site.
Now, the criticality is called prompt moderated criticality. It is not a bomb. A bomb is a prompt fast criticality. This reaction occurs slower than a bomb, but faster than what occurs inside a nuclear reactor. The Borax experiments were designed to test just how violent that reaction could be. I think if you look at Borax and compare it to Fukushima Unit 3, you will see that there are an awful lot of similarities.
Again this is a theory, but it is the only theory that accounts for the explosion occurring on the side where the fuel pool is, and it is the only theory that creates the uplift force that caused the fuel particles to be thrown about the site and discovered as far as 2 kilometers away.
Well there is one more piece of evidence and that is that the roof over the fuel pool has been totally destroyed whereas the roof over the nuclear reactor and the containment, collapsed downward. We talk about that in a video on the site as well and I think that is another important indication that whatever it was that caused the fuel to lift occurred on the fuel pool side of the building, and not in the middle where the nuclear reactor was.
The videos after the accident and after the explosion show containment leaks as well. You will see in the weeks afterward, steam coming from the center of the building. And I believe that the containment lid lifted on Unit 3 and never went back down straight, so it has lifted and twisted sideways and radioactive gasses are lifting from that containment lid. But there is not enough evidence to say that that is what caused the explosion that we saw during the accident. The jury is still out and will be for 10 years until we get inside the Fukushima reactor to see what the damage is. But right now, I think my theory accounts for the damage, the speed of the shock wave, and also the fact that the contamination has been found as far away as 2 kilometers.
Maggie Gundersen: Arnie, let's talk about the Unit 4 spent fuel pool. There have been a lot of questions about that and a lot of concerns right now. Was there a hydrogen explosion at the Unit 4 spent fuel pool and if there was, what is a hydrogen explosion and why would it have occurred there?
Arnie Gundersen: One of the biggest mysteries at Fukushima is how did Fukushima Unit 4 explode? There are a couple of very, very grainy videos that clearly show it did explode. It was a different type of explosion and perhaps a fire and an explosion that went on for a period of days. So exactly how it did explode is one of the big questions about the Fukushima accident.
There are 3 competing theories. Tokyo Electric says that the radioactive gasses over in Unit 3 went through a pipe that connected Unit 4 and entered Unit 4 causing Unit 4 to explode. So Tokyo Electric's position is that the radioactive hydrogen that was created in Unit 3 went through a pipe, entered Unit 4, and there it exploded. There is one piece of evidence that supports that. There is some contamination in some filters in Unit 4 that would indicate that gasses did come from Unit 3.
So that is a possibility, but I do not think it is accurate because I believe that the containment was so damaged on Unit 3, that there was no pressure to push those gasses into Unit 4. I can't understand how the gasses, what the mode of force was to push those gasses into Unit 4. I think the hydrogen explosion came from something in side Unit 4 itself. There are two possibilities there.
One is by Dr. Gen Saji and it is an excellent analysis. He believes that the hydrogen in the water in the pool that was dissolved because of the radiation in the pool over months and months and months, was enough to cause the building to explode. As the water got hot in the fuel pool, it liberated the hydrogen that was in the water and that hydrogen was enough to cause the explosion.
The second possibility, and this is my theory, early on in the accident, there is some video that is up on our site, that shows that the top of the fuel racks were exposed to air. I am not suggesting that the entire fuel pool ran dry. But the top of the nuclear fuel I believe was exposed to air and I think the photos show that. So if the top of the fuel was exposed to air, it is possible that a reaction could have occurred at the top of the fuel that would have created enough hydrogen to blow the building up.
Dr. Saji and I agree that the hydrogen came from the Unit 4 fuel pool. He believes it was dissolved in the water. I believe it came from the fuel. Only time will tell when we get in to analyze the reaction. But there is an important lesson here that the nuclear industry is not taking into account. And that is the fuel pool temperature. The fuel pool is a large pool and it can boil locally. And that is something the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the international community is not looking at. You can get local boiling in a pool even though the bulk temperature of the pool may be at 80 degrees Celsius. In portions of the pool, it can be boiling. That supports Dr. Saji's comment that as it boiled it would liberate hydrogen, even though the bulk temperature never ever exceeded boiling.
My theory is that I do believe that the entire pool had drained to the point where there was boiling occurring. But the real issue here is that the nuclear industry is not looking at the fact that localized boiling can occur even though the bulk temperature might be less than 100 degrees centigrade.
That is an important distinction moving forward. We have about 23 of these Mark I reactors in the United States and there are another 10 or so around the world. I think that we need to design these pools so that the hydrogen generated by dissociation can be accommodated without exploding the building. No one ever designed for that because no one ever anticipated it happening. But it did happen at Unit 4 and we need to prevent that in the future. Not just on these Mark I reactors but on the 400 reactors that all have fuel pools that are all susceptible to that identical type of failure.
Maggie Gundersen: Arnie, I want to follow up with a few more questions. In your discussion of Unit 4, you have talked about its hydrogen explosion. Is there any chance of a prompt criticality or a hydrogen explosion now at Unit 4? Would anything cause it to release more fuel or more radioactivity?
Arnie Gundersen: The fuel in the fuel pool at Unit 4 has now been cooled for about a year after the accident and it had been removed a couple of months before that. So the fuel is becoming cooler. It still needs to be water-cooled for another 2 years, but it is much cooler than it was at the beginning of the accident. So the chances of hydrogen generation are much, much lower now than when the accident occurred. So I do not believe that we are going to see an explosion in the pool now, no matter what happens.
My biggest concern is that if the pool loses water, then it is an entirely different story. So if there is a large seismic event that causes the building to topple, or the pool to crack and the water to drain out, there is not enough cooling in the air of that fuel, and it will start to burn. Now the consequences of that are depending on which way the wind is blowing, it could mean the evacuation of Tokyo as a worst case. It could also mean cutting Japan in half so that the northern part is separated from the southern part by a band of contamination. So this is a very serious accident waiting to happen and we just all have to pray that an earthquake does not happen before that fuel is removed.
Maggie Gundersen: Arnie, compared to the accident at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, how dangerous are the radioactive releases from the four reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi?
Arnie Gundersen:Three Mile Island was a level 5 accident and Chernobyl and Fukushima are level 7 accidents. That means roughly that Three Mile Island was a 100 times less than the accident at Chernobyl and the accident at Fukushima. People did die as a result of the accident at Three Mile Island. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says no, no one died, on their web page. But the evidence is clear that there was an increase in cancer. I refer you to Dr. Steve Wing's report that is also on our site that talks about it. And in addition some reports coming out of the University of Pittsburgh indicate just now that we are beginning to see leukemia as a result.
So while Three Mile Island was much less than either Chernobyl or Fukushima, people did die as a result of the radiation released. At Fukushima-Daiichi the evidence tells us that at least three times more radiation in the form of noble gasses were released from Units 1, 2 and 3 than from Chernobyl. We have seen radioactive gas clouds, noble gas clouds to the northwest, that are much worse than we ever anticipated to have been released. So we know that the noble gasses were larger than Chernobyl. Now iodine, which is another gas that is released, and also cesium and other gasses, seem to be roughly on the same level as the releases from Chernobyl.
There are 2 issues here. As terrible as it is, it would have been much worse but for 2 things. The first is that most of the time the wind was blowing out to sea. And of course Chernobyl was surrounded by land, so whatever way the plume meandered after Chernobyl, it contaminated the land. So when we compare Fukushima to Chernobyl, the total releases from Fukushima are likely higher than they were at Chernobyl, but because most of it blew out to sea, that is a good thing for the Japanese people.
The second important thing that happened that was lucky, if we can call it luck in such a severe accident, was that it happened on a Friday and not on a weekend. There were a thousand people at the Daini site and at the Daiichi site, because it was a weekday, who could respond to the accident. If it had happened on a weekend, there would have been a small crew of people there and the accidents at both sites would have been much much worse. Now that has an implication worldwide, because on weekends and in the evenings, we have very small crews at these nuclear reactors. And should there be a major accident, there is no way to respond quickly enough with the small crew of people that are working on the shifts, other than the main shift in the middle of the day.
The international community needs to look at that and it is not a matter of well, we can get people there in a half a day. That is too late. The staff on site has to be larger at the beginning of the accident to mitigate the potential for a serious accident. But yet it all boils down to money. The utilities that run these power plants really do not want a large staff because they have to pay for it. But in fact, it was the large staff at Daiichi and the large staff at Daini that likely saved the world. So the important take-away here is that the releases from Fukushima are as serious if not more so than Chernobyl. And that they would have been much worse if the accident had happened on a weekend.
Maggie Gundersen: Arnie, thank you. How significant is the danger of hot particles and why?
Arnie Gundersen: I am really concerned about the hot particles that were released after the Fukushima accident. Now a hot particle is more than just a single atom. An atom of cesium decays once and it is over, it is no longer radioactive. A hot particle though, contains thousands or hundreds of thousands of atoms of cesium or other radioactive material and they, of course, decay for many, many years and decades.
So if a hot particle is lodged inside you, either in your lung or in your liver or in your gastrointestinal tract, it can cause a constant bombardment of radiation over a long period of time to a very small localized part of your tissue. And that is exactly the conditions that can cause a cancer.
So we have seen in Mr Kaltofen's analysis to the American Public Health Association: he shows what an air filter looked like in a car in Fukushima and what an air filter looked like in a car in Tokyo. Those air filters are no different than our lung, our lung acts as an air filter, and that causes that radiation to get trapped in our lungs or in our livers or elsewhere in our bodies, and will constantly, over decades, cause cellular damage. It is particularly a concern in young children because they have a longer life, and because their cells are rapidly developing. So it is important that we monitor the children at Fukushima and throughout Japan over the next 3 or 4 decades to make sure that they do not develop cancers as a result of the hot particles that were released from Fukushima-Daiichi.
Maggie Gundersen: So Arnie, in closing, what do you want people to remember from your review of the accident at Fukushima-Daiichi?
Arnie Gundersen: About a month before the accident, we were walking and we were talking about an accident and where it might occur. And I said I did not know where it would occur, but I thought it would occur in a boiling water reactor of the Fukushima design, I said a Mark I reactor. And it turned out to be true.
But I think the bigger lesson from Fukushima is that this is a technology that can destroy a nation. After Fukushima I was reading Mikolai Gorbachov's memoirs and he says it was the Chernobyl accident, not Perestroika, that destroyed the Soviet Union. So we had that information for 30 years but yet we really did not realize that it could happen elsewhere. So we know that the accident at Chernobyl was a cause in the factor of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we know that the cost alone from the Fukushima-Daiichi accident will easily go to a half a trillion US dollars over the next 20 years. That is enough to bring Japan to its knees.
Japan is at a tipping point. You have an opportunity here to change the way we use energy. Or Japan can go back and turn on all its nuclear reactors again and continue business as usual and of course risk another accident. So you have a choice, you have the opportunity to change the way you use energy and to change the way you distribute energy. You can create smart grids that share power from the north to the south and from the east to the west, where the frequencies are different. We can distribute our generation, instead of having massive power plants in locations like Fukushima-Daiichi and Fukushima-Danai. We can distribute those power plants throughout Japan, throughout the world, with windmills, with solar power, with conservation and with distributed small sources of generation.
Those are all one way of doing it compared to the other which we are presently using, which is central station power. We needed central station power in the 20th century. Now with computers, we do not need central station power anymore. We can do it another way. And Japan can lead the way if it chooses to. If it leads the way, it will have an export commodity that the rest of the world will want desperately. You have an opportunity here to change your country. And you also have a business opportunity here to sell to the rest of the world a product that we all desperately need.
So the Fukushima-Daiichi accident is the worst industrial accident in history: it is a half a trillion dollars. But it also can be an opportunity for Japan to change the way it does business and to create the economy for the 21st century and beyond with distributed generation and smart grids. I hope you choose that choice. Japan is at a tipping point and it is your choice to make.
Well this story came out today, it was about the Spent Fuel Pool cooling systems going offline at the damaged reactors at Fukushima Daiichi but also for the other Nuclear Power Plant Daini. They say the cooling, Cesium absorbing system, Nitrogen injecting system for reactor 1,2,3, and the gas purifying system of reactor 2 were stopped because of trouble with the power exchanging facility in Iwaki Fukushima.
The press conference TEPCO held we can read what was said
TEPCO’s switching station in Minami Iwaki had a problem that caused the voltage to drop momentarily. They turned the switch off for a few milliseconds to clear the system.
TEPCO doesn’t know what caused the problem at the switching station.
The systems are getting back online. Kurion is still stopped. None of the systems needs to be continuously operated.
(There is absolutely no urgency in either question or answer, so I think everything is dandy now. I’m signing off.)
Everything seems to be online again and power have been restored since this incident, but what really is surprising to find out if you read between the lines is that the Fukushima Plants are running without any backup power generators!!
We have had some big (M5) earthquakes these past weeks around Japan and Fukushima with one of them causing damaged to the Fuel Pool at the Daiichi Nuclear Plant (not reported on in the news) cracking the cooling system causing an evacuation at the plant. Military helicopters to come in and 100s if not 1000s of Police have been seen by locals to arrive at nigh time (to try and avoid any suspicion by the locals)
Well this happened the first day of 2012 at nigh when the earthquake struck. I'm getting a little bit of track here but I only want to keep you updated that's all. Because the news sure doesn't.
This is just insane, to think that all this time the plant would have been running without backup generators working properly. Is this really true? How stupid are they really. We have been so close to another big earthquake that could easily take out the power another time just as long as it did that day in March 2011 when the earthquake struck these past weeks. And looking at the earthquake activity and reports from people studing the activity seem to agree that there is going to be another big earthquake sometime in the near future.
Some scientists also have alarmed about the posibillity that another tsunami could come in that is as big or even bigger than the one that caused the disaster.
Given all these threats, you really would expect them to have working generators in place at the Fukushima Plant / Plants if we count in Daini also. But reading this story it sure don't seem like it. Another devestating quake and Daini is also going to follow the same fate as the disaster stricked Daiichi plant.
I remember last time on the show they were talking about how could 2012 become any worse than 2011. Well it turns out that the first day, 1 January 2012 we got the answer. The Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant is in serious trouble.
Jeff Rense is here with Yoichi Shimatsu again and this time.. It sounds bad, I mean really bad. I’m talking about military taking over at the Fukushima plant and pulling out workers because the recent earthquakes. The Fukushima plant is now evacuated and in emergency state. There is movement still at the plant, but the earthquakes have cracked the fuel pool above reactor 4 and drained all water. Plutonium have been released and even been detected by Michael Collins in the US 30 000 feet up in the Jet Stream, radiation is traveling all over the Northern Hemisphere.
You got to hear this amazing audio with Jeff Rense and Yoichi Shimatsu. It’s a must hear!
Jeff Rense: OK and welcome back, lets go over to Hong Kong and talk to Yoichi Shimatsu our colleague and the man who has contributed so much to our understanding of the catastrophe that now envelopes the entire Northern Hemisphere. Again the story out today, it’s actually been out for a while but recapitulated nicely by greenmedinfo.com. Plutonium from Fukushima made it all around the planet, we know that now. We just heard Michael Collins describing what his readings where, flying an aircraft back to Michigan from California at 20 – 30 000 feet. Extraordinary levels being measured on the incoming air from outside which would suggest the obvious that there is a lot of radio nuclide activity, Isotopes if you will, in the Jet stream at higher elevations which are slow to settle down, but they have circled as Yoichi said they would the Northern Hemisphere and things are not getting any better. Hello my friend and welcome back.
Yoichi Shimatsu: Hello Jeff I like to wish you a happy new year but unfortunately this year I mean the very early hours of the first .. year, at the .. of new years day, right as it began we see another major new event at Fukushima.
Jeff Rense: Yeah
Yoichi Shimatsu: The plant in the last week, the plant have been evacuated, there is a massive emergency going on, many of the Fukushima plant workers not only been pulled out of the plant but out of the whole environment there, from out of Fukushima province entirely. A lot of people contaminated with Plutonium, a major event of military helicopters streaming in and 100s if not 1000s of Police officers moving up there very quietly at night time.
Jeff Rense: What’s… OK.. They are blocking off the entire plant with hundreds or maybe 1000s of..
Yoichi Shimatsu: .. Evacuated workers are being pulled out of there...
Jeff Rense:Now are we confirmed on this Yoichi?
Yoichi Shimatsu: Yeah, pretty much we got witnesses in towns all over, radiation levels are up, the Plutonium they just saw probably came from this recent event. What happened is that 2:30 in the morning, major earthquake occurred in the Izu Islands, they are part, they are right of Tokyo, in fact they are part of Tokyo prefecture, Hachijo-jima a very deep earthquake. And this fault line in fact directly is part of the central axis fault line that goes right up the middle of Japan north worth. As I described earlier it looks like you know we are in for some geological changes, there is a major Volcanic explosion expected by the meteorological agency. The quake thought, did not damage buildings, it did apparently crack the cooling tank above reactor 4, the MOX reactor, there is no water up there in the pool the cooling pool. And apparently a lot of the spent fuel rods where .. around, knocked over causing meltdown, Plutonium released and the evacuation of the plant. And now it is all on emergency. Now this have all gotten by for two reasons. Obviously the government have imposed national security regulation so that the media is not reporting. And the other thing is that you know the Japanese official holidays for new years is very long, it’s the most important holiday of the year so it’s usually 6 days but because of the weekend it went into 8 days so basically we are just coming out of the new years holiday and you know in Japan people don’t go out and drink and all that, they stay at home very quietly. So right now the full dimensions of this, are yet to really come out to the public. But we are picking up you know this incredible mobilization in the early part of the new years week which was .. drove by some of the residents along the highways .. down.
Jeff Rense: Yeah alright this is very..
Yoichi Shimatsu: There is a national holiday, there was suppose to be a cold shutdown as TEPCO and the nuclear industry had promised and so this was just an emergency that could not have gone unnoticed. So therefore we are seeing something occurring here and you just mentioned I heard Mr. Collins had picked up some Plutonium in the atmosphere, probably as an result of this.. Levels are spiking..
Jeff Rense:According to one of the reports, a major pipe to the SFP (Spent Fuel Pool) in reactor 4 broke, all the water came out of the tank. The tank was seen to be actually what they call boiling without water, that means it had gone critical again.. That’s right, the spent fuel pool was and is melting down. So they actually pulled the workers out of there, because of this they’d be dead obviously immediately, they would not have any suckers to run..
Yoichi Shimatsu: Well obviously some of them have evacuated completely out of the whole area so they must have been contaminated, this must have taken them by surprise, again the quake was at 2:30 in the morning on the 1 Jan 2012 a lot of workers probably were you know resting fairly soundly this is a … so it’s early. So a lot of them were exposed to the radiation and now so we have another massive dent in the workforce, I mean we are running out of what we call human robots, we are running out of people with suicidal tendencies who are willing to work at the plant.
Jeff Rense: Or Yakusa volunteers..
Yoichi Shimatsu:Yeah the entire plant is at stake because if you don’t have enough manpower to you know watch over the pump that are going into the reactor cores, eventually you are going to have breakdowns, maintenance problems, refueling problems, switching problems so this is really a critical situation. And it’s so critical that the Japanese government, TEPCO and the media are not reporting on something this massive.
Jeff Rense: Two more earthquakes, actually 3, two more today (9 Jan 2012) a M3.5 and a M2.7 residents are reporting that these quakes for some reason feel like they are directly underground like they are bombs going off and odd, they say they are different, they are not offshore 20-30 miles. They are actually occurring in the worse possible location apparently right under the Fukushima plant.
Yoichi Shimatsu: Well what’s happening is there is energy being released along the entire, all 4 fault lines, basically the whole Island is sort of rotating and moving upward to the north and so basically this is, you know and as more energy released like smaller quakes that builds up at a certain point and you get a massive release like we just did with the M7.0. And the meteorological agency’s is expecting a series of M9.0 earthquakes in the immediate, in the near future.. So we are looking at, we are looking at some massive quake action, and already there is a lot of Volcano sort of half eruption or the initial stages of eruption now so we can expect much, much more activity like this which is only going to knock out the energy supply, cut of roads and so on. So we are in for a really devastating year and this again like I said, it’s 2:30 in the morning on January 1, so you know I don’t know how you take it happy 2012.
Jeff Rense: Well I have been using that very same caveat with my wishes to people, Happy New Year, I’m sorry there is not much Happy out there, that’s the truth.
Yoichi Shimatsu: That’s right.. So anyways, so second cover-up, we are not even a year out of this thing and we got another major cover-up underway ok..
Jeff Rense:One more M7.5 and the Spent Fuel Pool at building 4 will likely come down. And most of the building will come down with it.
Yoichi Shimatsu:Well it is tilting as you said, and the racks are all in disarray
Jeff Rense: Oh they are a mess, we got pictures of them now….
There have been a lot of earthquakes lately around Japan and I would like to do an update on this. The earthquakes outside Tokyo have measured M5.0 and M5.1. However there have been both big and small earthquakes off Fukushima now also. The quakes did not damage buildings however the cooling have been cracked above reactor 4 at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant. There is NO WATER in the pool and the fuel rods have been knocked over!!
Plutonium have been released, the nuclear fuel stored have started to meltdown at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant because of the damage done by the recent earthquakes. The plant is now on emergency and the situation is very serious. The plant have been evacuated, not only have the TEPCO workers been pulled out from the nuclear plant, they have left the Fukushima province!
Where is the news? Yoichi Shimatsu talks about this in his most recent interview. ☢ MP3 - Fukushima Deteriorating - Yoichi Shimatsu and Jeff Rense 01-09-12 ☢
T
he reason behind the media blackout is the Japanese New Years celebrations. The official holidays for new years in Japan are very long, for them this is the most important holiday of the year usually lasting 6 days. But because of the weekend this have now been longer. So up until Monday 9 Jan 2012, not much had been reported. And as time goes by more on this recent disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant will come out.
(Did you read this Email from 16 March 2011 that came out just now? It talks about the walls of the spent fuel pool at reactor 4 falling down.. 10 Months on and this is now new news to all. TEPCO have really hidden a lot of things from the public, remember this was back in March when media was saying that the situation was under control and nothing to worry about.) NRC March 2011 Email: “The walls of the Unit 4 spent fuel pool have collapsed, and there is no water in there”
I have made a map showing the last weeks earthquakes in Japan that are above M4 quakes.
You can see from the picture that there have been many above M4 earthquakes off the Fukushima coast but also many that are above M5. The last one the blue dot is an M4.8 Earthquake and that was today. Because this map only show earthquakes above M4 there are many quakes that are left out. The list below will include all earthquake activity starting from 5 Jan 2012.
There is a lot of speculation as to why this sudden increase in earthquakes around Japan. I can't really say for sure, if this is a natural thing. It can be solar activity causing this, but if you are up to speed on the latest I'm sure you have your own theory already.
When it comes to radiation detection meters you really have a wide field of gadgets to choose from, however radiation detectors are the most common to use.
First of all if you need to know what type of radiation you are looking for. There are Alpha, Beta and Gamma radiation detectors. And also there is neutron emission of nuclear radiation. And all these different types of emissions have radiation detectors for a specific type of radiation that you can buy radiation detector for. Some also measure both Alpha and Beta. Others detect Alpha, Beta and Gamma. While others let you measure Beta and Gamma radiation.
What most people have use for though are Dosimeters you can buy a handheld radiation detector pretty cheap that are good addition to a survival kit. There are different kinds that you can use that will detect radiation. There are radiation badges that will tell you when radiation become high. Workers at nuclear power plants use these to inform them of how much radiation they have been exposed to. Now also children in the Fukushima prefecture have each been given a radiation badge so they know if they are exposed to radiation. Some come in the shape of a pen that you can carry in your pocket while other are made more compact so that you can attach them to your keychain. And then you have what is called a personal radiation monitor. These are also called Dosimeters and also normally called Geiger counters. Although not all use the Geiger-Muller Tube for the radiation detection some use a semiconductor instead. These and mostly the older geiger counters seen are pretty big to carry around, so they might not be best suited for a survival situation where you only need to carry the most important things. However if you have land and want to check radiation around the property and drinking water then these are the geiger counters to get because they are very well built units.
These are the once that you normally see people use. They have different units of radiation detection, because when it comes to radiation there are many standards used. some give the measurements in Rads, while other use Sieverts. Some have the maximum radiation value for the measured radioactivity quite low but they will still give you an idea of the amount of radiation in the area. With the units ranging from between background radiation 0.001 mSv/hr all the way up to 10 Sv/h. Normally a dosimeter will measure radiation in micro siverts per hour. If you were to walk into one of the reactor units at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant you probably would get an error reading from your dosimeter because the radiation levels are so high there.
Note that some places outside the exclusion zone in Fukushima that are too radioactive for people to live in have areas where the radiation levels are above 30 Sv/h. So if you are in a area that have high radiation the radiation detectors would also there go off the scale. However Geiger counters or radiation detectors are still favored as general purpose alpha/beta/gamma portable radiation detectors and radiation detection equipment, due to their low cost and robustness. Most come with an LCD Display that show you the radioactivity in the area. Nowdays you will even get alarm sound and the possibility to connect the device to a computer. Either with a Infrared, Bluetooth or USB connection.
So if you look at the radiation detectors for sale that have this, then these radiation detection meters will allow you to make maps of contaminated areas that show where the radiation is high and low. This also will help you to see which areas are becoming more contaminated over time. With several nuclear reactors in the US and around the world located near fault zones that makes it a danger if a big earthquake would hit the area there is always a good choice to have a radiation dosimeter avaliable. I'm sure many in Fukushima would have been grateful to have dosimeters avaliable at the time of the disaster and I am sure you to would be grateful to have a geiger counter handy when you need one.
radmon.org - Global Radiation Monitoring Live Map
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