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Global Food Scare Widens From Japan Nuclear Plant
TOKYO — Countries across the world shunned Japanese food imports Thursday as radioactive steam leaked from a disaster-struck nuclear plant, straining nerves in Tokyo.
The health ministry has detected 82,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium — 164 times the safe limit — in the green vegetable kukitachina, and elevated levels in another 10 vegetables, including cabbage and turnips.(REUTERS/Carlos Barria) The grim toll of dead and missing from Japan's monster quake and tsunami on March 11 topped 26,000, as hundreds of thousands remained huddled in evacuation shelters and fears grew in the megacity of Tokyo over water safety.
The damage to the Fukushima nuclear plant from the tectonic calamity and a series of explosions has stoked global anxiety. The United States and Hong Kong have already restricted Japanese food, and France wants the EU to do the same.
Russia ordered a halt to food imports from four prefectures — Fukushima, Gunma, Ibaraki and Tochigi — near the stricken plant 250 kilometres northeast of Tokyo.
Moscow also placed in quarantine a Panama-flagged cargo ship that had passed near the plant and put its 19 crew under medical supervision after detecting radiation levels three times the norm in the engine room.
Australia banned produce from the area, including seaweed and seafood, milk, dairy products, fresh fruit and vegetables.
It said, however, that Japanese food already on store shelves was safe, as it had shipped before the quake, and that "the risk of Australian consumers being exposed to radionuclides in food imported from Japan is negligible".
Singapore also suspended imports of milk products and other foodstuffs from the same four prefectures and Canada implemented enhanced import controls on products from the quartet.
The Philippines banned Japanese chocolate imports.
"Food safety issues are an additional dimension of the emergency," said three UN agencies in a joint statement issued in Geneva, pledging they were "committed to mobilizing their knowledge and expertise" to help Japan.
Japan was taking the right actions, said the International Atomic Energy Agency, World Health Organization, and Food and Agriculture Organization.
"Food monitoring is being implemented, measurements of radioactivity in food are taking place, and the results are being communicated publicly."
In greater Tokyo, an urban sprawl of more than 30 million people, strong aftershocks overnight and in the morning served as uncomfortable reminders that Japan's capital itself is believed to be decades overdue for a mega-quake.
The anxiety was compounded by the Tokyo government's revelation Wednesday that radioactive iodine in the drinking water was more than twice the level deemed safe for infants, although it remained within safe adult limits.
The news triggered a run on bottled water in shops and the city's ubiquitous vending machines, while the Tokyo government started to give families three 550-millilitre bottles of water per infant.
A measurement on Thursday was in the safe zone for infants again, officials said, but this was not enough to soothe all parents of young children.
"I don't want to panic," Kazuko Hara, 39, told AFP as she collected her three allotted bottles of water in Tokyo's Bunkyo ward.
"I will use bottled water for now. If we run out, I will use tap water. Experts say it's OK. But when you see people buying bottled water at stores and emptying store shelves, that makes you worry again."
Japan's government has also halted shipments of untreated milk and vegetables from Fukushima and three adjoining prefectures, and stepped up radiation monitoring at another six, covering an area that borders Tokyo.
The health ministry has detected 82,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium — 164 times the safe limit — in the green vegetable kukitachina, and elevated levels in another 10 vegetables, including cabbage and turnips.
At the source of the radiation — the Fukushima plant located on the Pacific coast — white smoke could be seen wafting from four of the six reactors.
Fire engines again aimed their high-pressure water jets at the number three reactor, a day after a plume of dark smoke there forced workers to evacuate, in their bid to avert a full meltdown that would release greater radiation.
Highlighting the risks taken by the emergency crew, three workers were exposed to at least 170 millisieverts when they stepped into a puddle of water that reached the skin on their legs despite their radiation suits.
Engineers have now linked up an external electricity supply to all six reactors and are testing system components and equipment in an effort to soon restart the tsunami-hit cooling systems and stabilize the reactors.
On Thursday, they partially restored power to the control room at reactor No. 1.
The grim statistics from Japan's worst postwar disaster kept rising, with 9,737 now confirmed dead and 16,501 listed as missing by national police.
Scientists at the Port and Airport Research Institute meanwhile found that the tsunami that swallowed entire towns was even bigger than first thought. In devastated Ofunato, Iwate prefecture, it topped 23 metres.
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15 Comments so far
Show AllMeanwhile, the fair and balanced, unbiased US Press still maintains that nuclear power is "safe and clean"...
As long as there is money to be made, the nuclear industry shills will sell their own grandmothers (and in this case, their own grandchildren) for a quick buck.
I think what you say is really true. (Actually, it is my feeling that in the current neoliberal mentality, people would drown their mothers and eat them if it meant they could gain an economic edge and buy a nice home with a car and an I-phone and the other trappings.)
I also think that the nuclear industry is transnational at this point-- in many ways and in many places it seems to be more powerful than governments. Or has bought sufficient influence within the government that it simply _is_ the government, as is the case with many countries in the benighted global economic system.
The only way that governments will be weaned off of nuclear power is if the people-- that's you, me, your well-connected and no-count friends, and your cousin and his friends and their cousins and the community next to your community-- drag the politicians, kicking and screaming and denying and pontificating and scheming and dealing and pocketing money and lying, tie them down, and force them to abandon this death-dealing, abusive, insanely expensive, market-averse and colossally stupid technology. And even then, your grandkids and their grandkids unto a thousand generations will have to do the same, because the lobbying to come back with "advanced-design" reactors will always be there. Like the banking industry, industrial agriculture and telecom, it is a cracking good way to extort huge sums of money from modern mass civilization, which imbues it with an irresistible appeal to the financial elites. And it will always be a tragically goofy idea, because of the toxic effects to life, and the lack of any way to store the wastes for a million years.
A friend once told me that perhaps the reason we haven't found "intelligent life" on other planets is that perhaps consciousness is counter-evolutionary, for the reason that once beings become aware, they alter the environment which allowed them to exist in the first place, guaranteeing their extinction. Hmm. A thought worth pondering, however discomfiting.
As if the natural disaster of the earthquake and tsunami weren't horrifying enough, it's sickening to watch the man made one continue to grow exponentially. Gut feeling tells me that Tepco and the Japanese government are lying about and minimizing the reported levels of radiation. As if the death tolls from the natural disasters weren't already horrendous, many more people will needlessly suffer death and sickness.
I predict this charade of regaining control of the plant will continue for another 2 weeks. When evacuations/mass exodus of Tokyo begins, then they will finally let go of their multibillion dollar investment, instead of trying to salvage it, and encase the whole damn plant under a sand and concrete sarcohogus, which they should have done last week. In these sick bastards minds, they probably think a 15 mile dead zone around the plant is an acceptable trade off if they can salvage part of their investment.
Nuclear reactors, near earthquake faults, in coastal tsunami zones!! Absolute madness and stupidity. Oh wait, I live in California- San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are just down the road....so glad our government and press says it could never happen here, because we're better prepared than the Japanese. Yeah, right. From the same corporate stooges that couldn't get bottled water after 5 days to the dying people of New Orleans. COMMERCIAL NUCLEAR REACTORS ARE TIME BOMBS OF DEATH.
"I predict this charade of regaining control of the plant will continue for another 2 weeks. When evacuations/mass exodus of Tokyo begins, then they will finally let go of their multibillion dollar investment, instead of trying to salvage it,"...
After they've sold what's left of their stock.
I agree.
they are not attempting to salvage anything, they racing against time to prevent a multiple of Chernobyl.
And its not a food scare, its Prudence.
At least Diablo Canyon has the right name. I doubt that we will be able to get out of our nucler deal with the devil without paying the devil part of his due.
yes...
http://www.clowncrack.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/BribeOfFrankestein.jpg
And still, the highest priority of the US government is to wage more war on the other side of the planet. When will we Americans and our government ever begin to attend to our interests and those of humanity? How will it happen that the US government becomes a government to serve the human interests of Americans?
The US DOE released some of its ground and air monitoring data around the plant a couple of days ago:
http://blog.energy.gov/content/situation-japan
it shows a plume about 25 miles long northwest of the plant with exposure rates of greater than 12.5 mR/hr (thats mili Roentgens not mili rems) or about 0.125 mSv/hr.
the criterion for relocating people following the Chernobyl disaster was 350 mSv/lifetime. the exposure rate in this plume would achive the relocation criterion in 2800 hours or 116 days.
if this is due to Cesium 137, which, in part, it certianly is, then this area will likely need to be permanently abandoned. probably a good lot of Strontium-90 in there too.
Good to know. That may be as good a measure as we get.
DOE has lied before, though. They might play straighter since the catastrophe has happened in Japan, but a lot of their associates are waiting for gov't monies to build and run nukes in the US, so they might not.
Just like the Three Mile Island misinformation campaign, the absence of coverage is leading my doctor, friends and other professionals who don't have the time or background to understand just how damaging this crisis will be to everybody to all assume it's taken care of.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course the $64,000 question is:
Is the steam coming out of all four of the exploded reactors because of:
A. pools of seawater are vaporizing, or is it
B. because the fuel rods have melted down to reacting LAVA which will melt though the bottom of each reactor resulting in "CHINA SYNDROME" into the water table: which we can never put out?
Black Smoke was probably the HUNDREDS of spent Fuel Rods stored above the reactor contacting air and going critical..... Some take cooling pump action for four years to make them safe. They have not been cooled internally as designed for over a week. Pissing on the outside with corrosive sea water is not going to work imho.
These are hollow fuel rods, which once melted into lava can no longer pump water through them.
Sweet Jumping Jesus! The dishonest Nuclear Industry and the dishonest Japanese government knew this was going to happen. For days they have lied on Jap TV saying there was no threat to human health, when anyone with a physics background who studied the accidents at TMI and Chernobyl knows this one is way worse. After the tsunami and the hydrogen explosions all the delicate piping, control valves and wiring are no longer going to function reliably. I saw broken pipes and wreckage sticking up into the air between the reactors. It would take months or years to restore function of these disconnected control rooms. Re-establishing power to Pan Am 103 which is falling to the ground is usless.
I submit the answer to the above question is B: All four reactors are melting down into lava. I base this on the repeated evacuation of all staff repeatedly EACH DAY, as readings at the plant become lethal and all work is interupted. These freaking Frankenstein reactors are RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER. I've never seen anything so irresponsible since the DC-10 engineers decided that an un-contained tail engine explosion would never happen. Tell that to all the corpses at Sioux City. Fortunatey, that kind of engineering "can't happen" only kills a couple of hundred people in most cases. These plants are going to spew deadly INGESTABLE particles for years that are already circling the globe.
This Frankenstein Monster that Oilbomber has fallen in love with is going to kill us all.
As the other poster correctly noted before: FOUR reactors have to be walled off in thirteen feet of cement ASAP. Low level exposure that continues for weeks is just as deadly or even more deadly than high level exposure that is brief. The high level exposure at the plant is EXTERNAL radiation. The low level exposure that you're going to get, for all practical purposes is INGESTED, INTERNAL radiation.
What you can expect if we can't get rid of Obama:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_poisoning
These are all just my opinions only, and I could be wrong. But as Ralph Nader correctly points out: Why are we letting the Nuclear Industry and the government continue to play Russian Roulette with our health?
TJ
right you are TJ.
they are lying for one reason alone: if the 30 million or so people that live within 200 km of the plant knew the truth and tried to run away, then what? they live on an island. where do we move them, and with what?
any engineer who says "can not happen" is lying or incompetent. I'm and engineer and I know what the probablility of failure is for everything I design and it is NEVER zero.
Thanks Gridman,
I come from a family of conservative republicans and right now, they are in a state of denial, saying the next generation of reactors will be even safer!
Right now, according to Alexander Higgens Blog (google it), the EPA live radiation detector chart is spiking in Fresno, Bakersfield and San Francisco.
I just emailed them those charts. Hope they can wake up! Nuclear fission just to boil water is insane!
TJ
Make no mistake about it. This is the beginning of the end of nuclear power. The most dangerous threat is always the one that is unrecognized. Or in the case even deliberately concealed. We have had over 50 years of exposure to nuclear power accidents, disasters and near disasters. Yet hundreds of plants have been built worldwide. All the while governments and power companies remain in a state of denial about not HOW to store the waste safely but IF it can be stored safely. Glen Seaborg called plutonium, one of the radioactive substances leaking from Fukushima, "fiendishly toxic". Think about that term. It is usually applied to a human being with evil intentions. Yet this substance is so poisonous and damaging that it is worthy of this term.
Nuclear power is dying of self inflicted wounds. It is a technology that is ultimately UNcontrollabe, because radioactivity lasts so long that has to be isolated from the environment essentially permanently. Human beings do not have the capacity or the understanding of the concept of permanence. It is beyond our ability to achieve. Yet corporations have pressured governments to overlook this fact so that the shareholders can be satisfied. Decision making power must be taken out of the hands of those profitting from those decisions. In the meantime, we will have to live side by side with Chernobyl and Fukushima as permanent cancers on the ecology; black holes of radioactivity. Let's hope people wake up soon and demand from the governments that nuclear power be halted in its tracks and phased out as soon as is practicable so no other environmental black holes are added to this list.
A fundamental human shortcoming is a lack of understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law is a Law of Nature that we cannot repeal, yet we seem to never stop trying. Why? Because the people who make the Decisions don’t understand that Law.
What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Well suppose I handed you two glasses of water, one hot and one cold, and asked you to perform the difficult trick of producing two glasses of lukewarm water. No problem you say, getting a bowl and pouring in the two glassfuls, and your mission has been accomplished. Suppose on the other hand I gave you instead two glasses of water, both lukewarm in temperature, and asked you to produce one glass of water that is hot, and one that is cold. Not quite so easy. You have to get a refrigerator and a heating source to accomplish this mission.
The same if I gave you two glasses of sand, one black and the other white. Easy to turn into a mixture of gray sand, but difficult to separate once mixed.
The Second Law applies specifically to heat, but in its more general form it also states that inanimate Nature prefers chaos or randomness to order. Nature tends to mix things up. The scientific way to say this is that in any closed system, entropy can only increase but never decrease. If somewhere entropy actually decreased by establishing a greater degree of order, then this is always done at the expense of increasing entropy somewhere else. Entropy in the Universe is constantly increasing.
Living things can indeed create a degree of order – even an amoeba is able to organize itself in a way that permits it to live. And human beings are able to create order in much more sophisticated fashion. Yes, if energy is applied to an otherwise closed system, then indeed its entropy can be decreased or its state of order increased, always of course correspondingly increasing entropy outside the closed system.
Now we humans seem to have a strong belief in our ability to establish order and keep it that way forever. We create nuclear reactors, we create the most dangerous of materials such as Plutonium, and we think we can keep those materials safely confined for the next ten thousand years. A microgram of Plutonium in one’s lungs will induce cancer. Yet we play with that material by the pound and by the ton. We forget that there are 100 year earthquakes, that there are terrorists or individuals who would be willing to kill a million people for whatever devious end they might seek. And it is the earthquakes, the baddies, and not the rest of us, that are aligned with the Second Law. If we human beings want to continue to live on this Planet, we had better start acting more nearly in consonance with the most fundamental laws of Nature.
Some people, especially those of the Energy industry, will retort with “but we need the energy.” Yes, we do need a certain amount of energy. What we really need is available from the Sun, the oceans, and the wind. Who says that we have to be driving trucks (aka “sport-utility vehicles”) around the Beltway with an average occupancy (including the driver) of 1.01? Pure madness.
If we want to go on living here, we had better learn to conserve, and we had better learn to wean ourselves from the nuclear demon we have created.
Felix.