The Japanese Government Is Failing The Fukushima Mushroom Test!
-- I am not being flippant, satirical, cynical or facetious. There are just some things that don’t add up, things that smell bad and sound like outright lies. We all know Mushroom Clouds are bad, but being treated like a mushroom: “Being Kept In The Dark And Fed Bullshit” can be just as deadly. Japan’s Government is failing “The Mushroom Test”.
In addition to under reporting the fires at Fukushima, the Japanese government has not told the people about the ominous fact that the nuclear plant site is a hellish repository where a staggering number of spent fuel rods have accumulated for 40 years.
A contributor to the Occupational and Environmental Medicine list who once worked on nuclear waste issues provided additional information about Fukushima’s spent fuel rod assemblies, according to a post on the FDL website.
“NIRS has a Nov 2010 PowerPoint from Tokyo Electric Power Company (in English) detailing the modes and quantities of spent fuel stored at the Fukushima Daiichi plant where containment buildings #1 and #3 have exploded,” he wrote on March 14.
The PowerPoint is entitled Integrity Inspection of Dry Storage Casks and Spent Fuels at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and can be read in full here. The document adds a new and frightening dimension to the unfolding disaster.
The Fukushima Daiichi plant has seven pools dedicated to spent fuel rods. These are located at the top of six reactor buildings – or were until explosions and fires ravaged the plant. On the ground level there is a common pool in a separate building that was critical damaged by the tsunami. Each reactor building pool holds 3,450 fuel rod assemblies and the common pool holds 6,291 fuel rod assemblies. Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods. In short, the Fukushima Daiichi plant contains over 600,000 spent fuel rods – a massive amount of radiation that will soon be released into the atmosphere. It should be obvious by now that the authorities in Japan are lying about the effort to contain the situation in order to mollify the public. It is highly likely there are no workers on the site attempting to contain the disaster.
Earlier today, a report was issued indicating that over 70% of these spent fuel rods are now damaged – in other words, they are emitting radiation or will soon. The disclosure reveals that authorities in Japan – who have consistently played down the danger and issued conflicting information – are guilty of criminal behavior and endangering the lives of countless people. On Tuesday, it was finally admitted that meltdowns of the No. 1 and No. 2 reactor cores are responsible for the release of a massive amount of radiation.
After reporting that a fire at the No. 4 reactor was contained, the media is reporting this evening that it has resumed. The media predictably does not bother to point out why the fire is uncontainable – the fuel rods are no longer submerged in water and are exposed to the atmosphere and that is why they are burning and cannot be extinguished. It cannot be stressed enough that the situation at Fukushima represents the greatest environmental disaster in the history of humanity, far more dangerous that Chernobyl, and the government of that country is responsible.
Perhaps the most underreported and deadliest aspect of the three explosions and numerous fires to hit the stricken Fukushima nuclear reactor since Saturday is the fact that highly radioactive spent fuel rods which are stored outside of the active nuclear rod containment facility are likely to have been massively compromised by the blasts, an elevation in the crisis that would represent “Chernobyl on steroids,” according to nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen.
As you can see from the NPR graphic below, the spent fuel rods are stored outside of the active nuclear rod containment casing and close to the roof of the reactor complex. Video from Saturday’s explosion and subsequent images clearly indicate that the spent fuel rods at Fukushima unit number one could easily have been compromised by the blast.
According to Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, the failure to maintain pools of water that keep the 20 years worth of spent fuel rods cool could cause “catastrophic fires” and turn the crisis into “Chernobyl on steroids.”
The BBC is now reporting that “spent fuel rods in reactors five and six are also now believed to be heating up,” with a new fire at reactor 4, where more spent rods are stored, causing smoke to pour from the facility.
“Japanese news agency Kyodo reports that the storage pool in reactor four – where the spent fuel rods are kept – may be boiling. Tepco says readings are showing high levels of radiation in the building, so it is inaccessible,” adds the report.
“At the 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, where an explosion Saturday destroyed a building housing the reactor, the spent fuel pool, in accordance with General Electric’s design, is placed above the reactor. Tokyo Electric said it was trying to figure out how to maintain water levels in the pools, indicating that the normal safety systems there had failed, too. Failure to keep adequate water levels in a pool would lead to a catastrophic fire, said nuclear experts, some of whom think that unit 1’s pool may now be outside,” reports the Washington Post. The rods must be kept cool because otherwise they start to burn and, in the case of reactor number 3, would release plutonium and uranium in the form of vapor into the atmosphere.
“That’s bad news, because plutonium scattered into the atmosphere is even more dangerous that the combustion products of rods without plutonium,” writes Kirk James Murphy.
“We’d be lucky if we only had to worry about the spent fuel rods from a single holding pool. We’re not that lucky. The Fukushima Daiichi plant has seven pools for spent fuel rods. Six of these are (or were) located at the top of six reactor buildings. One “common pool” is at ground level in a separate building. Each “reactor top” pool holds 3450 fuel rod assemblies. The common pool holds 6291 fuel rod assemblies. [The common pool has windows on one wall which were almost certainly destroyed by the tsunami.] Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods. This means the Fukushima Daiichi plant may contain over 600,000 spent fuel rods.”
There have been massive design issues with the Mark 1 nuclear reactor stretching back three decades.
As ABC News reports today, “Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing — the Mark 1 — was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.” “The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant,” Bridenbaugh told ABC News in an interview. “The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release.”
The calamity at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is deteriorating and the nightmare scenario is becoming more likely. The levels of radioactive iodine in the seawater beyond the plant have soared to 1,250-times above normal, contaminating the fish in the area and turning the coastal waters into a nuclear wasteland.
At the same time, the prospect of a full-core meltdown still looms-large with no remedy in sight. Brave workers have put their lives on the line with no meaningful sign of improvement. The lights are still "blinking red."
Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Maryland, details the toxic cocktail that will emerge if there's an explosion at Fukushima:
"The mechanisms of the accident would be very different than Chernobyl, where there was also a fire, and the mix of radionuclides would be very different. While the quantity of short-lived radionuclides, notably iodine-131, would be much smaller, the consequences for the long term could be more dire due to long-lived radionuclides such as cesium-137, strontium-90, iodine-129, and plutonium-239." (Libya, Oh What a Stupid War; Fukushima, Cover-Up Amid Catastrophe, Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch)
If the spent fuel rods catch fire from lack of coolant, the intense heat will lift radiation plumes high into the atmosphere that will drift around the world.
At present, the pools are in danger because two of the three stricken reactors have lost their cover due to hydrogen explosions. The risks are unparalleled and the remedies uncertain. A full damage assessment is still pending. There is no "quick fix."
The media has flipped into full "BP Oil Spill-mode," making every effort to minimize the disaster and to soothe the public with half-truths and disinformation. The media's goal is to conceal the scale of the catastrophe in order to protect the nuclear industry. It's another case of profits over people. Still, the truth is slipping out in dribs and drabs.
Radiation has popped up in the Tokyo water supply, imports of milk, vegetable and fruit from four prefectures in the vicinity of Fukushima have been banned, and the evacuation zone around the plant has widened to an 18-mile radius. This is news that the public can use to prepare themselves as they see fit. The rest is propaganda.
Monitors have detected tiny radioactive particles which have spread from the reactor site across the Pacific to North America, the Atlantic and Europe...
According to Reuters: "It's only a matter of days before it disperses in the entire northern hemisphere," said Andrea Stahl, a senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research."
The Japanese government has been downplaying the crisis to make it look like they have matters under control. But it's all a sham. The only real change has been the way the gov-media have shaped the information to pacify the public. It's shameless. Rather than sweeping it under the rug, the government should be taking extra precautions to save lives. This is from the Union of Concerned Scientists website:
"Our assessment is that the Japanese government is squandering the opportunity to initiate an orderly evacuation from larger areas around the site--especially of sensitive populations, like children and pregnant women. It is potentially wasting valuable time by not undertaking a larger scale evacuation at this time."
Naturally, the government is covering up as much as possible for the powerful nuclear lobby. President Obama has continued flacking for the industry even while clouds of radiation still rise from Fukushima. It's not the public that politicians are worried about, but their big money constituents who fill the campaign coffers. Still, the truth is observable for those who wish to see. The Japanese have employed desperate measures to mitigate the accident, but to little effect. The prospect of a meltdown, a fire, or another apocalyptic explosion grows more likely by the day. Fukushima's Chernobyl moment could be fast approaching, putting tens of thousands at risk of thyroid cancer, childhood leukemia and other potentially life-threatening ailments.
Don't believe the media's lies.
Damaged Japanese Nuclear Plant Has Five Mark 1 Reactors
Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing -- the Mark 1 -- was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.
Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark 1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power, and today that design is being put to the ultimate test in Japan. Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been wracked since Friday's earthquake with explosions and radiation leaks, are Mark 1s.
"The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant," Bridenbaugh told ABC News in an interview. "The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release."
The situation on the ground at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is so fluid, and the details of what is unfolding are so murky, that it may be days or even weeks before anyone knows how the Mark 1 containment system performed in the face of a devastating combination of natural disasters.
But the ability of the containment to withstand the events that have cascaded from what nuclear experts call a "station blackout" -- where the loss of power has crippled the reactor's cooling system -- will be a crucial question as policy makers re-examine the safety issues that surround nuclear power, and specifically the continued use of what is now one of the oldest types of nuclear reactors still operating.
GE told ABC News the reactors have "a proven track record of performing reliably and safely for more than 40 years" and "performed as designed," even after the shock of a 9.0 earthquake.
Still, concerns about the Mark 1 design have resurfaced occasionally in the years since Bridenbaugh came forward. In 1986, for instance, Harold Denton, then the director of NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, spoke critically about the design during an industry conference.
"I don't have the same warm feeling about GE containment that I do about the larger dry containments,'' he said, according to a report at the time that was referenced Tuesday in The Washington Post.
"There is a wide spectrum of ability to cope with severe accidents at GE plants,'' Denton said. "And I urge you to think seriously about the ability to cope with such an event if it occurred at your plant.''
Bridenbaugh told ABC News that he believes the design flaws that prompted his resignation from GE were eventually addressed at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Bridenbaugh said GE agreed to a series of retrofits at Mark 1 reactors around the globe. He compared the retooling to the bolstering of highway bridges in California to better withstand earthquakes.
"Like with seismic refitting, they went back and re-analyzed the loads the structures might receive and beefed up the ability of the containment to handle greater loads," he said.
When asked if that was sufficient, he paused. "What I would say is, the Mark 1 is still a little more susceptible to an accident that would result in a loss of containment."
ABC News asked GE for more detail about how the company responded to critiques of its Mark 1 design. GE spokesman Michael Tetuan said in an email that, over the past 40 years, the company has made several modifications to its Mark 1 reactors in the U.S., including installing "quenchers" and fortifying the steel structures "to accommodate the loads that were generated." He said that GE's responses to modifications ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were also shared with the Japanese nuclear industry.
Bridenbaugh told ABC News that he is watching the events in Japan with a mix of anxiety and deep reflection. Many years have passed since he and fellow GE colleagues Gregory C Minor and Richard B. Hubbard publicly resigned, joined the anti-nuclear movement, and became known as the "GE Three."
Undoubtedly, he said, the containment structures at that Fukushima Daiichi plant are facing significant amounts of pressure -- and testing the very questions he was studying on paper more than three decades earlier. While he knew then that the Mark 1 had design limits, he said, no one knows now whether those limits will be surpassed.
The problems at Japan's Fukushima-1 nuclear plant have had an unexpected impact on the country's ability to keep time: a transmitter that sends the national time signal to many thousands of clocks and watches has been forced offline making the timepieces a little less reliable than usual.
The transmitter is on top of Mount Otakadoya in Fukushima prefecture, about 790 meters above sea level and 16 kilometers from the stricken Fukushima-1 power station. The radio station, called JJY, sends a signal that reaches most of
Japan including the capital, Tokyo.
The site is well within a government-mandated 20-kilometer evacuation zone and engineers were forced to abandon it on the evening of March 12 (at 7:46 p.m. JST to be precise -- they were keeping time).
As they left, they powered down the transmitter and that left some devices without a reference time signal.
The devices, which include things like watches, traffic signals, and taxi meters, have internal clocks that keep running in the absence of the radio signal, but the ability of some to auto correct has been lost.
A second transmitter exists in western Japan on the island of Kyushu. Its signal also covers most of Japan, but it transmits on a different frequency. Some devices don't have a tuner for the second frequency while others might be hampered by the signal, which is weaker in Tokyo and east Japan.
The National Institute of Information and Communications and Technology that runs the transmitter sites said it doesn't know when JJY service from Fukushima will resume.
The evacuation zone around the Fukushima-1 plant remains in place as work continues to bring the plant under control. Airborne radiation levels have been steadily dropping over the last few days, but the situation at the plant remains serious.
It could be some time before engineers are allowed back to the station and JJY returns to the air.
Japan is not alone in broadcasting national time over radio.
The U.S. national time is delivered via WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado, and WWVH in Kekaha, Hawaii; and dedicated radio services also exist in Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, China, Ecuador, Finland, Germany, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Spain and Venezuela. In France and the U.K., the time signal is encoded alongside longwave radio broadcast stations.
AND HERE IS REAL TROUBLE! |
Craig's List Toronto today posted positions for writers of right-wing political commentary on social media and internet news outlets, reports News from Underground. Although the listing posted at 1:03 PM EDT on March 28, hours later this ad for writing positions was no longer visible on the site.
The text of the listing [image HERE] did read as follows: -------------
Writers needed to post Right-wing Comments to social media and news outlets.
We are a social media company working for a political organization, hired to help balance the left-wing bias of the major media outlets by supplying a team of writers who will post to newspaper comments, media forums, FB pages, etc. We are NOT officially afliated (sic) with Harper campaign.
Your writing must be strong, right-wing and use supplied talking points without bogging down in too much detail. You are creating an online persona with a consistent tone.
Ideally you can find or make up facts and statistics to stir controversy. Where suited humour, sarcasm and personal insults are welcome.
You are a news junky who is able to long on to news forums, facebook pages several times a day. You are able to write comments tailored to new topics while always repeating key talking points.
Compensation: TBD. Hourly rate and volume of online activity. Bonuses for controversial postings that heat up a topic or forum thread.
How to apply: We are more interested in your writing than your resume. To apply submit a 100 word post based on the headline "Ignatieff Promises No Coalition after Election" Show us that you can write from a right wing character voice, score points, stir outrage and use humor.
Be sure to include your name, email and cell number so we can contact you.
Sorry, only candidates who submit the best test post submissions will be contacted for an interview.
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The authenticity of the ad, in as much as it has been removed, cannot be verified. However, the listing brings into focus the issue of anonymous postings on the internet.
To what extent is public sentiment influenced by writers who are given paid incentives to repeat talking points, "heat up" the discussion, score points and stir outrage while operating from an anonymous personna?
SOURCE: News from the Underground
