Group items tagged

"To control the "harmful rumor",Foreign Ministry is inviting SNS (SM) gurus to Japan. Learning from the revolution in the middle east asia,Foreign Ministry is trying to media control by using Facebook and Twitter. Though they force us to decontaminate the kindergarten on our own expense,they are going to invest 1500 million yen into media control. They are trying to make the gurus say Japan is safe,Japanese food is safe,Japanese products are not contaminated ignoring the fact that the low dose symptoms take time to appear."

"When it comes to nuclear power it usually takes a while for the truth to come out. And now six months after Japan's catastrophic earthquake and tsunami, sparked off the current crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the truth is finally beginning to emerge. The Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) still struggling to bring the stricken Fukushima reactors under control today, but the consequences of this crisis are set to continue for decades. As time goes on, of the long term radioactive contamination that has spread over wide areas that will take decades to dissipate; this risks of potential health problems, and ongoing contamination of food supplies. Large areas around the nuclear will remain off limits."

"A government panel on reviewing radiation dose standards plans to propose that the government adopt an interim annual radiation exposure limit between 1 to 20 millisieverts for ordinary people instead of the current 1 millisievert limit, panel sources said Wednesday. The recommendation by a group under the panel, headed by Otsura Niwa, a professor emeritus at Kyoto University, would be employed when the government reviews provisional radiation limits for food products and soil, many of which were hurriedly set after the start of the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. However, the plan to raise the annual radiation exposure limit for ordinary people could be criticized for endangering health, potentially affecting the subsequent review process, observers said."

"The governor of Shizuoka Prefecture, a major tea leaf production region in Japan, urged the health minister Thursday to revise the provisional limit of radioactive substances in the product. Shizuoka Gov. Heita Kawakatsu said the maximum level was unreasonable and a recent test showed tea leaves and processed tea in the area as being safe during a meeting with health minister Ritsuo Hosokawa, who promised to make public the results and check the limit's validity. The survey was conducted under an instruction from the ministry of health, labor and welfare. "The government applied the limit set for foods to tea, 95 percent of which is used for drinking. That was the cause of the confusion," Kawakatsu said. "Confusion and anger are swirling in the tea industry in our prefecture.""

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ruled that more work needs to be done on an environmental assessment for a produce irradiator that's proposed for a location near Honolulu International Airport. Advertisement The commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board issued a ruling last week saying the NRC staff needs to consider alternate technology and sites in producing the assessment. The board's decision said it expects the staff to give meaningful consideration to transportation accidents in preparing a final environmental assessment. The ruling came after almost three years of discussion at the NRC, which has been considering Pa'ina Hawaii LLC's request to build an irradiator that would use up to a million curries of cobalt-60 to treat local fruits such as papayas, vegetables and other items so they can be shipped to the Mainland insect-free.

"Exposure to radiotherapy or radiation-based diagnostics like computed tomography (CT scans) in early childhood increases breast cancer risk in adulthood, a new study in the Jan 2010 issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. The study involved women exposed to thymic irradiation during infancy from 1926 to 1957. Breast cancer was identified in 96 treated in an average dose of 0.71 Gy and 57 untreated women during 159,459 person-year follow-up. Adams MJ and colleagues from University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry found women who were treated by radiation were 200 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than those who did not receive radiation. Higher doses of radiation were linked to high risk of breast cancer."

Two out of the six damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station are now under control in a state known as "cold shutdown" after engineers restored emergency water pumps using diesel generators. The reactors, Nos. 5 and 6, had already been shut down before last week's historic earthquake and tsunami, posing less of a risk than the other reactors at the plant. But their cooling systems were knocked out, and the fuel rods left inside the reactor started to heat up, together with spent fuel rods stored in a separate storage pool. "We are getting closer to bringing the situation under control," Tetsuro Fukuyama, the deputy chief cabinet secretary, said of the entire plant late Sunday. The Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, had appeared to suffer a serious setback as officials said that pressure buildup at the ravaged No. 3 reactor would require the venting of radioactive gases. The reactor contains a highly toxic fuel that includes reclaimed plutonium. This announcement came after an all-out mission Saturday to cool the reactor by firefighters, who doused the it with 2,400 tons of water over 14 hours.

There are 14 potentially active fault lines in areas near the crisis-hit Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant and other nuclear-related facilities, the Japanese government has announced. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency announced the results of research undertaken by power utilities following the Great East Japan Earthquake. The 14 faults discovered to be potentially active were previously considered unlikely to cause earthquakes. According to the research, a magnitude-7.6 earthquake could occur on the potentially active Hatakawa fault line in Fukushima Prefecture, the largest magnitude earthquake estimated. The agency said the intensity of any quakes from the fault lines would not exceed the level the facilities were designed to withstand. It also said there were no problems with the facilities' quake resistance. Five of the 14 fault lines are near Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 nuclear power plants. The other nine are near Japan Atomic Power Co.'s Tokai No. 2 power plant and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency's Tokai reprocessing plant in Ibaraki Prefecture.

"Fukushima shiitake cesium spikes Kyodo FUKUSHIMA - Radioactive cesium exceeding the designated limit has been detected in shiitake grown in greenhouses at a farm in Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, the prefectural government said. The prefecture said Saturday it has asked the city of Soma and dealers to stop shipment of the mushrooms, and a local agricultural cooperative has begun recalling them after they were found to contain 850 becquerels of cesium per kilogram, exceeding the 500-becquerel limit set by the state. The farm in question has grown the mushrooms on beds made of a mixture of wood chips and nutrients, and the wood chips used in them are suspected to have been contaminated with the radioactive substance, according to the local government. The mushroom beds were sold by the Soma agricultural cooperative. The farm has shipped 1,070 100-gram packages of shiitake since Oct. 24, and they are believed to have been sold at nine supermarkets in the prefecture from Tuesday. No other shiitake produced by the farm have entered the market, it said."