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Today's Top News
Japan Nuclear Firm Admits Missing Safety Checks at Disaster-Hit Plant
Documents show operator failed to carry out mandatory checks at Fukushima Daiichi and allowed fuel rods to pile up
The power plant at the centre of the biggest civilian nuclear crisis in Japan's history contained far more spent fuel rods than it was designed to store, while its technicians repeatedly failed to carry out mandatory safety checks, according to documents from the reactor's operator.
Black smoke rising from reactor No 3 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. (AFP/Getty Images) The risk that used fuel rods present to efforts to avert disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was underlined on Tuesday when nuclear safety officials said the No 2 reactor's storage pool had heated to around boiling point, raising the risk of a leakage of radioactive steam.
"We cannot leave this alone and we must take care of it as quickly as possible," Hidehiko Nishiyama, of the nuclear and industrial safety agency, said.
According to documents from Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company repeatedly missed safety checks over a 10-year period up to two weeks before the 11 March disaster, and allowed uranium fuel rods to pile up inside the 40-year-old facility.
When the plant was struck by a huge earthquake and tsunami, its reactors, designed by US scientists 50 years ago, contained the equivalent of almost six years of highly radioactive uranium fuel produced by the facility, according to a presentation Tepco gave to the International Atomic Energy Agency and later posted on the company's website.
The revelations will add to pressure on Tepco to explain why, under its cost-cutting chief executive Masataka Shimizu, it opted to save money by storing the spent fuel on site rather than invest in safer storage options.
The firm already faces scrutiny over why it waited so long to pump seawater into the stricken reactors and, according to a report in the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper last week, turned down US offers of help to cool the reactors shortly after the disaster.
Critics of Japan's nuclear power programme say the industry's patchy safety record and close ties to regulating authorities will have to change if it is to regain public trust.
"I've long thought the whole system is a mess," Taro Kono, a Liberal Democratic party MP, told Reuters. "We have to go through our whole nuclear strategy after this.
"Now, no one is going to accept nuclear waste in their backyards. You can have an earthquake and have radioactive material under your house. We're going to have a real debate on this."
Kono wants to see the government lead a fundamental reform of the industry's structure, which he says has encouraged collusion between plant operators and the people who are supposed to regulate them.
Reports said safety lapses at the plant continued up to two weeks before the tsunami disabled cooling systems in its reactors and sparked the biggest nuclear power emergency the world has seen since Chernobyl in 1986.
One month before the tsunami, government regulators approved a Tepco request to prolong the life of one of its six reactors by another decade, despite warnings that its backup power generator contained stress cracks, making them more vulnerable to water damage.
Weeks later, Tepco admitted it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment inside the plant's cooling systems, including water pumps, according to the nuclear safety agency's website.
Regulators have been accused of uncritically backing industry moves to prolong the life of ageing nuclear power plants such as Fukushima Daiichi amid mounting local opposition to the construction of new facilities.
A regulatory committee reviewing the reactor's stay of execution said maintenance management was "inadequate", and the quality of inspection "insufficient," according to reports.
When disaster struck earlier this month, the plant contained almost 4,000 uranium fuel assemblies kept in pools of circulating water – the equivalent of more than three times the amount of radioactive material usually kept in the active cores of the plant's reactors.
The drop-in water levels in some of those pools after the tsunami has caused fuel rods to overheat, raising the risk of a full meltdown and the release of dangerous levels of radioactivity into the atmosphere.
Tepco workers, troops and firefighters have been working around the clock to keep the storage pools replenished by dumping water from helicopters and via high-pressure hoses from the ground.
The No 4 reactor, which suffered two explosions last week, contained 548 fuel assemblies cooling in a water pool on its upper floor.
Japanese plans to store radioactive nuclear fuel after it has been used have made little headway.
A medium-term storage site in Mutsu, northern Japan, is not due to open until next year, and the construction of an enrichment and reprocessing plant in Rokkasho has been hit by technical glitches and other delays.
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44 Comments so far
Show AllThe New World Order aim is Population Reduction.....
This situation is all part of the world depopulation schemes of the global elite so why are you surprised? The elite don't give a damn about this problem so long as its the rabble who perish from the earth.
Say Hello to the new Global Fascist Order.
Since this level of radiation poisoning results in a very slow death, the ones who benefit most are the same who benefit from food and environmental toxins, medical/pharma industry.
If only everyone were this cynical, the world would be a safer place where collusion and conspiracy would be so much more difficult to achieve.
It is logically impossible to argue that nuclear power is safe. Radioactive rods remain toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. Think about the hubris, folly in guaranteeing the impossible management of this material over the course of centuries.
folly, indeed...
one or two large accidents and your potential future spent fuel rod babysitters are erased before ever being born...
an unused fire extinguisher buried under charred debris...
Mr. Smith might want to pass the rod cooling business to junior, but junior doesn't come along, as Mr. Smith has become sterile in the meantime...along with many others...
could be a lot of unattended nuclear 'campfires' around here before long...
then there's the potential change in precipitation patterns...where'd that water go?
According to documents from Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company repeatedly missed safety checks over a 10-year period up to two weeks before the 11 March disaster, and allowed uranium fuel rods to pile up inside the 40-year-old facility.
i think it's because we become complacent about the dangers..............
I think it's because of "collusion between plant operators and the people who are supposed to regulate them."
Coco,
I think you are right. It is very easy when something operates smoothly for 40 years to assume that it will continue to do so.
Even if the company was careless in its inspections, however, it would not affect what has happened here. To change this result would have required moving the plant a kilometer inland or building the protective levee 5 meters higher.
Bill
FTA -- "The revelations will add to pressure on Tepco to explain why, under its cost-cutting chief executive Masataka Shimizu, it opted to save money by storing the spent fuel on site rather than invest in safer storage options."
This is what capitalism looks like: Maximize your profits and get society to pick up the tab for cleaning up your mess.
Perhaps Japan's a healthier society that might require the criminals to pay but, if it's like the BP spill, it will be the flora, fauna and people of the area who bear the cost with their lives and their health.
"safer storage options" ?!
This article could have been written about many reactors in America. There is nothing "spent" about these fuel rods and must be carefully cared for for millions of years.
"allowed fuel rods to pile up"
The oldest reactor in America is in Eureka, CA. It's been closed since the 1970's
Full of piled up fuel rods. PG&E complains they can't do anything about it until we allow Yucca Mountain sacred national park to be opened up and rods to be dumped in the underground wellsprings above Las Vegas and above an earthquake faultline.
A reply to a reply I made to a post on this topic a couple days ago said the only reason it hadn't already been stashed in Nevada was Harry Reid's position as Senate Majority Leader. Reid, one of the most boring, least mediagenic politicians ever, is the only person holding the line against effort to use Yucca Mountain as the place to stow this toxic to all living things stuff. Dull as he is, may he hold on to his job there for a long time.
Indeed, re Harry Reid. I would have liked to have read your post. This subject is near and dear to me.
It is not the ONLY reason.
Another two reasons might be that the Yucca Mountain site was chosen mainly for political reasons (only those pesky Native Americans to complain) and the fact that the site is not nearly as safe as the DOE originally thought.
Don't forget that this is the very same DOE who said it would perfectly safe to store the waste in the cracked bedrock next to Sebago Lake in Maine (which happens to be the source of drinking water for Portland). But the folks of Maine had a little bit more political clout than the Native Americans in Nevada so that is why the proposed storage site ended up at Yucca Mountain.
:You should perk your ears up when you hear PG&E mentioned. This is the company in charge of the high pressure gas line under the town of San Bruno in California. PG& E was in charge of the safety and the maintainence of that pipe line that blew up killing many and destroying a whole neighborhood.
PG&E is in charge of the safety of nuclear power plants in California. Only one thing to do, and DO IT NOW. Shut down all the nuclear plants. You will have to reduce your use of electricity, but you will be alive and not just waiting for cancer to kill you.
I sit here wondering why I am NOT suprised. Seems like the Global elite have the same attitudes everywhere.
It seems that the only regulators that do what they are supposed to do are mechanical except when you throw in the human factor and greed. Tony
Here is a prediction of wind carrying the radioactive plume. It's not showing radiation, only the wind currents and their direction.
http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~tcanty/hysplit/
The radiation disperses (somewhat), as it moves east, so they claim it won't affect us. But they said the same about the Gulf Spill.
Anyway this is a generic prediction of where air currents are headed; right at the U.S. and Canada. Note how close Alaska is!
Trust us, nuclear power is totally safe! We have layers and layers and layers of redundant safety mechanisms designed to make something unsafe, safe!
It's like driving with an airbag AND a pillow duct taped around your head. See? Extra safe!
Indeed, the 1972 Rasmussen Report said that the odds are just one out of 500,000,000,000 that you will come to harm. This report was written around the time that the plant was designed. So of course the plant is safe.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has a lot of good information at their site.
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_risk/safety/
The Chinese are working on thorium-powered nuclear reactors which are a whole lot safer that uranium powered reactors. We need to be working on things like this instead of building more behomeths like the aging ones we have now.
JMALH,
In principle, I agree with you but the lead time to build the first truly commercial thorium reactor in the US is probably 10 to 12 years if we pursue it with vigor. I would hate to have to wait that long to start replacing coal plants.
There are a couple of different styles of thorium fueled reactors. I don't know which you prefer but my favorite is the liquid salt fuel reactor (see energyfromthorium dot com)
Bill
I just heard about this today and need to look into it further. Any of our alternatives will take time. The trick is to get started. Thank you for the link.
At this time I can barely imagine using the terms "The Chinese" and "a whole lot safer" in the same sentence. China is a massively polluted wreck of a country.
Good point, PaulK! However, the Chinese are also building windmills. Thorium is abundant and cheap. They must be looking down the road at the future scarcity of oil and the expense of uranium plants.
"One month before the tsunami, government regulators approved a Tepco request to prolong the life of one of its six reactors by another decade, despite warnings that its backup power generator contained stress cracks, making them more vulnerable to water damage."
The Thanatos Syndrome (book by Walker Percy) in action. From wikipeda:
In 1989, Percy stated that, in The Thanatos Syndrome:
"I tried to show how, while truth should prevail, it is a disaster when only one kind of truth prevails at the expense of another. If only one kind of truth prevails -- the abstract and technical truth of science -- then nothing stands in the way of a demeaning of and a destruction of human life for what appear to be reasonable short-term goals." [1]
Critic Allen Pridgen—in his book, Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes (2000) -- describes the "disconnectedness" that the protagonist, Dr. Tom More, begins to notice in The Thanatos Syndrome:
"Perhaps the single most important idea in Percy's epistemology, expressed again and again in his essays and interviews (especially MB, 282), is his conviction that this kind of impoverishment in the power to name experience causes a subsequent impoverishment of consciousness and being since it is only through language transactions with others that the self locates who and where it is."
Pridgen points out that it is not just the victims of the chemical additive in the drinking water who are being "impoverished":
"....but also the scientists who victimize and study them. They, including Tom, are enclosed in a lifeless, self-constructed interior world of scientific abstractions that numb them to the realities of the phenomenal world and the flesh-and-blood people in it. All, Percy maintains, are casualties, of a 'century of death' (MCON,120-21), an 'age of thanatos' (TS, 86)."
For those whose eyes glaze over at the comment on the Thanatos Syndrome, I wish to ask you to do a small thought experiment.
Imagine a geologist being asked to statistically determine the possibility of a strong earthquake in San Francisco in the next 100 years. Would his answer be different in 1907 than if the study was done in 1904? Why?
On a 100 year time scale, one big earthquake shouldn't make that much difference, right?
Corporate scientists have allowed the profit motive to taint objective scientific analysis. Don't trust them.
I heard one estimate that the radiation released so far, assuming nothing new happens, will cause 120,000 extra cases of cancer. I have no reason to doubt the number. So, the price of corruption is about 5 Japanese tsunamis.
Here's how much I believe Japan and the US Nuclear shills:
Queue image of Linus using his blankey to cover his head, while a time bomb ticks next to him.
Japanese Nuclear Regulators and Plant Operators are joined at the hip - the same as in America. I'm unworried about Japanese radiation but I'm terrified of US radiation.
Getting reliable information from Big Nuke here has proven to be much more difficult.
eze,
The information on CD, while not necessarily inaccurate, is definitely spun.
As near as I can tell, the information on this link is straight up and not adorned with sensationalism or propaganda. It is an international nuclear news outlet:
www . world-nuclear . org/fukushima/japanese_tohoku_earthquake . html
Bill
Current microSv/h near Fukushima #2 is 202 fluctuating between 270 and 187.
Let's do some math, shall we?
ONE Sv equivalent dosage per hour equals ONE GRAY in absorbed dosage.
EACH HOUR the equivalent dosage must be ADDED to obtain absorbed dosage.
0.200 mSv/h X 24 hours equals = 4.8 mSv (i.e. 4.8 mGray)
Now if that keeps up for one year you have absorbed 1,752 mSv (i.e. 1,752 Gray)
That absorbed dosage will make you infertile, destroy your immune system (it never recovers) AND give you all the classic symptoms of radiation sickness like hair falling out and vomiting. Cancer is a CERTAINTY if you don't first die from an opportunistic pathogen that takes advantage of your compromised immune system.
This does not even consider what the absorbed dosage would be if you actually breathed in or ate food or drank water with radioactive isotope contamination.
The situation in Japan is grave. Five workers at the plant have already died and 15 are very sick.
Current radiation level on internet viewable meter:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/%E6%94%BE%E5%B0%84%E7%B7%9A%E6%B8%AC%E5%AE%9A-%E5%8D%83%E8%91%89
But the nuclear apologists are still saying that the safeguards worked.
It is not a flaming ball of slag so everything is fine.
It is time to build nuclear plants in every city in the US!
GE: Imagination at Safety
Plus, we now have a brand new WAR on.
No more time to waste on yesterday's news about Nuclear Power.
TEPCO knowingly defaulted on *mandatory* safety inspections, as well as covering up repeated instances of cracks, improperly installed critical hardware, improper maintenance, lax safety procedures, etc. The Fukushima Dai-ichi plant was the single worst offender.
The Japanese Government, knowing all of these facts, let them, all part of the 'wink-and-a-nod' old boys club that is still very prevalent in Japan.
Both parties, in combination with their inept and bumbling response to this crisis has left the very stark possibility of a nuclear disaster greater than Chernobyl staring us in the face.
Would you trust either of these two gangs of congenital liars/idiots to tell you the sky was blue right now?
It's not a 'government conspiracy', but it may as well have been.
They allowed fuel rods to pile up? Well, now, isn't that typical for every single nuke plant the world over? I can't quite follow the logic of an article that attempts to blame this on what we are being sold here and elsewhere as a 'freak' event and beyond probability. No, this was business as usual. And what is really worse--nothing is even slowing down 'nuclear business as usual.' I see Excelon stock is up. The future looks so bright it's radioactive...
"When disaster struck earlier this month, the plant contained almost 4,000 uranium fuel assemblies kept in pools of circulating water – the equivalent of more than three times the amount of radioactive material usually kept in the active cores of the plant's reactors."
Not to worry. In the US, the strict standards from the NRC were relaxed so that US plants could pack the rods in far more dense clusters than in Japan. US plants have far more fuel in storage than in Japan. It is perfectly safe to have the fox watching the hen house, as long profit is our first concern.
(Imagine what would have happened if the Japanese plant had followed the US standards. They were barely able to keep the loosely packed rods cool enough.)
Tokyo's mayor blamed tepco's "greed" on day one of the nuclear problems.
Greed is the source of the world's problems we read about on cd. Oil, weapons sales, de-regulation of everything, "austerity," war, deforestation, big AG, big Pharma, "free trade," etc.
Greed is killing us. There is only one hope - "A corporation is not a person . . ."
A 6-word Constitutional Amendment. Repeat, preferably with extreme emphasis, "A corporation is not a person . . ."
had there been no regulations and they had just been allowed to do inspections when they liked and as the marketplace dictated none of this would have happened.
Yes, I like that business model.
I will have to talk with the Koch brothers about my new venture.
I want to be paid to haul away the "spent" fuel, and then repackage it in one foot long canisters. These will give off heat at 600 degrees which will be perfect for heating homes all over the US (sorry, not available in my state). We all know that nuclear power is perfectly safe so why not use it heat our houses? (Kids, please stay out of the basement.) And the units will make a great electric car. No worry about dead batteries. (Coming soon: The Chevy Atom.) This will solve our enery crisis, our nuclear waste crisis, AND our population explosion!
Thanks GwNorth for the inspiration.
No problem. Just as long as you recognize sarcasm.
No problem. Just as long as you recognize sarcasm. You will remember they tried to blame the BP spill on too many regulations.
no comment
Not to be redundant, but http://steveosborn.blogspot.com/2011/03/twenty-five-years-ago-i-wrote-article.html
I've been warning that this might happen for almost a half-century. I wrote the above a few days after Chernobyl. Now it has come to pass, but the nuclear apologists don't give a damn as long as their bottom line keeps increasing and We the People pay the tab for their mistakes.
Long ago, Thomas Jefferson said:
-------------------------------
“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Thomas Jefferson
1743-1826
-------------------------------
Unfortunately, we let those chains become corroded and rusty from disuse and the government has now "become the legalized version of the first."
The tree of liberty is looking pretty droopy. Maybe time for some manure now?
By the way, somebody above wrote a bit on exposure and radiation sickness. It is ghastly. Nausea, weakness, hair coming out in clumps, bleeding from the gums. I thought I was going to die. I'm still here, but there are not too many of us left. Many died of really horrible cancers. Remember, No Nukes is Good Nukes.