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Given the increasingly serious circumstances involving Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the firm cannot be allowed to get away with ambiguous statements. Appearing Wednesday at a press conference at TEPCO's head office, the first he had held in about a month, company President Masataka Shimizu did not go into detail about future actions concerning the nuclear plant. All he said was: "I want to indicate [when the accident can be contained] as soon as possible." On the subject of compensation for people affected by the crisis, Shimizu said: "We'll act based on the law concerning compensation for nuclear disasters. We're considering provisional payments for urgently needed money." Under the law, the government will shoulder up to 240 billion yen for the Fukushima accident. If the total amount exceeds that figure, TEPCO is in principle responsible for the remainder. The total amount of compensation may reach trillions of yen, however, making it doubtful TEPCO will be able to shoulder such a burden. Therefore, the government and TEPCO have begun discussing a plan to establish a fund for compensation payments, to which other electric power companies will also contribute money.

Soon after the Fukushima accident last month, I stated publicly that a nuclear event of this size and catastrophic potential could present a medical problem of very large dimensions. Events have proven this observation to be true despite the nuclear industry's campaign about the "minimal" health effects of so-called low-level radiation. That billions of its dollars are at stake if the Fukushima event causes the "nuclear renaissance" to slow down appears to be evident from the industry's attacks on its critics, even in the face of an unresolved and escalating disaster at the reactor complex at Fukushima. Proponents of nuclear power - including George Monbiot, who has had a mysterious road-to-Damascus conversion to its supposedly benign effects - accuse me and others who call attention to the potential serious medical consequences of the accident of "cherry-picking" data and overstating the health effects of radiation from the radioactive fuel in the destroyed reactors and their cooling pools. Yet by reassuring the public that things aren't too bad, Monbiot and others at best misinform, and at worst misrepresent or distort, the scientific evidence of the harmful effects of radiation exposure - and they play a predictable shoot-the-messenger game in the process.

Fukushima Gov. Yuhei Sato has expressed anger at the central government and Tokyo Electric Power Co., saying both "betrayed" the people of Fukushima Prefecture with repeated assurances about the safety of nuclear power plants. "We feel we were betrayed [by the central government and TEPCO]," Sato said during an interview with The Yomiuri Shimbun on Thursday, nearly a month after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and the outbreak of a series of accidents at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant. "The central government and TEPCO repeatedly told us, 'Nuclear power plants are safe because they've got multiple protection systems,' and, 'Earthquake-proof measures have been taken,'" Sato said.

This map visualises crowd-sourced geiger counter readings from across Japan. Click on the circles to get more information on the readings in each area. These readings are aggregated by Pachube here. Measurements are represented in units of microsieverts per hour ( µSv / h). Original readings used the unit nGy/h and I take the approximation 1 Gy = 1 Sv. (See the Wikipedia entry on Sieverts)

Natalia Manzurova, one of the few survivors among those directly involved in the long cleanup of Chernobyl, was a 35-year-old engineer at a nuclear plant in Ozersk, Russia, in April 1986 when she and 13 other scientists were told to report to the wrecked, burning plant in the northern Ukraine. It was just four days after the world's biggest nuclear disaster spewed enormous amounts of radiation into the atmosphere and forced the evacuation of 100,000 people. Manzurova and her colleagues were among the roughly 800,000 "cleaners" or "liquidators" in charge of the removal and burial of all the contamination in what's still called the dead zone.

WASHINGTON (April 6, 2011) - In the weeks following the Fukushima accident, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and nuclear industry officials have been asserting that U.S. nuclear plants are better prepared to withstand a catastrophic event like the March 11 earthquake and tsunami than Japanese plants because they have additional safety measures in place. However, according to internal NRC documents (links provided below) released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), there is no consensus within the NRC that U.S. plants are sufficiently protected. The documents indicate that technical staff members doubt the effectiveness of key safety measures adopted after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. UCS obtained the documents on March 25 from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request it made a month before the Japanese disaster.

The scale of the Chernobyl disaster is not exaggerated and even understated," a victims representative and leading nuclear expert told Xinhua in an exclusive interview Wednesday. Alexander Zenchenko, the chairman of the Focal Alliance of Chernobyl Disaster Victims, also said the nuclear power plant catastrophe in Ukraine in 1986 and the current crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan were very different. Zenchenko, who is a famous Ukrainian nuclear chemist and physicist, is in a good position to know. He was rec

70 percent of fuel rods in reactor core at Fukushima nuke plant damaged The pool for spent fuel at the No. 4 reactor of TEPCO's Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is pictured in this Feb. 1, 2005, file photo. (Mainichi ) About 70 percent of the 400 fuel rods in the No. 1 reactor at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant are damaged, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has revealed. In addition, some 30 percent of the 548 fuel rods in the No. 2 reactor core and 25 percent of those in the No. 3 reactor core are also thought to be damaged, the power company stated on April 6. The figures are based on analysis of radiation data collected from the side of the reactor pressure vessel between the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and March 15. Just after the earthquake hit, the No. 1-3 reactors were successfully shut down when control rods were inserted into the cores. However, the plant operators soon lost the ability to adequately cool the cores, and TEPCO believes it possible some of the nuclear fuel pellets inside the fuel rods may have melted and leaked from their metal sheathes. At the time of the quake the plant's No. 4 reactor was undergoing a routine inspection and had no fuel rods in its core, while reactors No. 5 and 6 were not operating.

These images are from the Sizewell protest in the UK from April 26th 2011

"The consequences of the Japanese earthquake - especially the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant - resonate grimly for observers of the American financial crash that precipitated the Great Recession. Both events provide stark lessons about risks, and about how badly markets and societies can manage them. Of course, in one sense, there is no comparison between the tragedy of the earthquake - which has left more than 25,000 people dead or missing - and the financial crisis, to which no such acute physical suffering can be attributed. But when it comes to the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, there is a common theme in the two events. Experts in both the nuclear and finance industries assured us that new technology had all but eliminated the risk of catastrophe. Events proved them wrong: not only did the risks exist, but their consequences were so enormous that they easily erased all the supposed benefits of the systems that industry leaders promoted."

"Tokyo (AFP) April 26, 2011 A survivor of the Chernobyl disaster says people exposed to radiation from Japan's crippled nuclear plant will spend the rest of their lives fearing the "bombshell" of cancer and other dire illnesses. Tuesday marks the 25th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear calamity and coincides with efforts to stop radiation seeping from the Fukushima plant after its cooling systems were knocked out by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11. "The Fukushima accident is like the twin brother of Chernobyl," said Pavel Vdovichenko, 59, who had already accepted an invitation from Japanese anti-nuclear groups to join a rally marking a quarter-century since Chernobyl. "People in the two places have to suffer long-time hardship," Vdovichenko, a Russian, told AFP through an interpreter. "People in Chernobyl suffered from cancer after the accident. A similar thing may happen to Fukushima.""

Fukushima protest photographs 

After Fukushima, what? Japan's disastrous earthquake and tsunami that crippled its coastal nuclear reactors have reopened old questions for California: How big could the next inevitable earthquake be, and how safe are the state's nuclear power plants that now produce more than 15 percent of our electricity? Federal and state experts are reviewing every aspect of what went wrong at Fukushima's reactors, where fuel rods overheated, cooling efforts proved inadequate, radiation escaped and evacuation signals were, at best, mixed.

German activists show how to shut down a nuke plant video, followed by news report over social democrats opposition in meetings. 

This is a series of Rancho Seco Cooling Towers: Photos using various techniques 

"A senior nuclear adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Friday submitted his resignation, saying the government had ignored his advice and failed to follow the law. Toshiso Kosako, a Tokyo University professor who was named last month as an advisor to Kan, said the government had only taken ad hoc measures to contain the crisis at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant. In a tearful press conference, he said the government and its commissions had taken "flexible approaches" to existing laws and regulations, and ignored his advice after he was named an advisor on March 16. "I cannot help but to think (the prime minister's office and other agencies) are only taking stopgap measures... and delaying the end" of the nuclear crisis, he told reporters. Tokyo officials had drafted measures to deal with the accident that were not in strict accordance with the law, and the decision-making process had been unclear, he said. "There is no point for me to be here," as the Kan administration had failed to listen to him, said Kosako, an expert on radiation safety. "

"The time series data provided by Marian Steinbech, "A Crowdsourced Japan Radiation Spreadsheet", was visualized with custom C/OpenGL software to overlay circles on geographic maps of Japan. Recent versions of the data, going back to March 1, can be downloaded from his blog here: http://www.sendung.de/japan-radiation-open-data/. These moments in time were selected to highlight how the radiation has effected Ibaraki prefecture and Tokyo, and demonstrate that while direct gamma radiation dissipates with the square distance law, particle-based radiation also dissipates with distance due to weather scattering. Although much attention has been placed on Tokyo, a very interesting finding was that Ibaraki prefecture, population 2.9 million, has received a radiation dose equivalent to nuclear worker levels while its distance from Fukushima, 100km, places it outside the current evacuation zone of 30km."

"Activists in the Bay Area are marking the 25th Anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster with rallies, speakers, street theater, and educational events. Calling the Ukraine catastrophe "the most significant nuclear reactor failure in the history of nuclear power", anti-nuke enthusiasts say they want the world to remember that April 26, 1986 was the day when one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power station exploded, killing plant employees instantly and leading to a projected increase in cancer deaths in the hundreds of thousands. Tri-Valley CARES, Plutonium-Free Future and other groups concerned about the proliferation of nuclear power sponsored a panel discussion on April 10 in Oakland called "A Quarter Century of Chernobyl". The panel featured Russian women activists with first-hand experience in that nuclear reactor disaster. In Menlo Park, a community demonstration at the busy downtown intersection spilled over to a nearby outdoor cafe where lunchtime patrons became the audience for street theater with an anti-nuke message. "

"As Japan struggles to regain control of its Fukushima Daiichi power plant, there's lots of talk about which technical safeguards the plant lacked and which should be required in future nuclear facilities. But a new report points to another kind of safeguard that failed: public institutions. Nuclear power plants are designed for what the industry calls defense in depth: the inclusion of backup safeguards in case the primary safeguards fail. No single layer of protection should be trusted entirely. The same is true of people. No power plant operator should be trusted to maintain the safety of its reactors. We need multiple layers of scrutiny-inspectors, regulators, independent nuclear experts-to double- and triple-check the operator's work."

"Mistrust of the media has surged among the people of Fukushima Prefecture. In part this is due to reports filed by mainstream journalists who are unwilling to visit the area near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. But above all it is the result of contradictory reportsreleased by the media, TEPCO and the government. On the one hand, many local officials and residents in Fukushima insist that the situation is safe and that the media, in fanning unwarranted fears, are damaging the economy of the region.By contrast, many freelance journalists in Tokyo report that the central government is downplaying the fact that radiation leakage has been massive and that the threat to public health has been woefully underestimated. While the government long hewed to its original definition of a 20 kilometer exclusion zone, following the April 12 announcement that the Fukushima radiation severity level has been raised from a level 5 event (as with Three Mile Island) to a level 7 event (as with Chernobyl), the government also extended the radiation exclusion zone from 20 kilometers to at least five communities in the 30-50 kilometer range."