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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 Chernobyl exclusion zone is still a desolate place. It is slightly larger than the 20-km (12 miles) restricted area currently in place around Fukushima in Japan. The Japanese nuclear crisis, caused by an earthquake and tsunami, happened just before the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, the world's worst nuclear accident. Even after a quarter of a century, no-one in Ukraine is permitted to live within 20 miles (30km) of the plant, though a few pensioners have insisted on returning to be close to their family graves. As you drive in, you can see abandoned villages being slowly swallowed up by the forest. People who left their homes here in 1986 had no idea they would never come back.

FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN - Even as it struggled to contain the world's worst nuclear disaster in a quarter-century, Tokyo Electric Power Co. late last month quietly set out big plans for the future: It proposed building two new nuclear reactors at its radiation-spewing Fukushima Daiichi power plant. 18 Comments Weigh In Corrections? Graphic Graphic: Japan's nuclear emergency Video Video: The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says it has finally plugged a leak of highly radioactive water that had been draining into the Pacific. (April 6) More on this Story Amid nuclear crisis, Japan's Tepco planned new reactors Radioactive water no longer leaking into sea, nuclear plant operator says Japanese utility dumps radioactive water into Pacific to ease storage woes View all Items in this Story Tokyo Electric, known as Tepco, informed Fukushima prefecture on March 26 of its desire to start building the reactors as early as next spring, local officials said. That was just two weeks after an explosion at the utility's tsunami-crippled complex set off a cascade of catastrophes. The proposal was then included in a formal report submitted to authorities in Tokyo on March 31 as part of an annual process designed to assess Japan's future electricity supply.

Workers at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are being exposed to levels of radiation so high that monitoring devices are useless, a worker measuring radiation at the plant told NHK television today. No one can enter the Unit 1, 2, and 3 reactor buildings at the power plant because radiation levels are so high, he said, adding that pools and streams of water contaminated by high-level radiation are being found throughout the plant, crippled by a killer earthquake and tsunami March 11.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. succeeded in stopping highly radioactive water from leaking into the Pacific Ocean from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant early Wednesday morning after injecting a chemical agent, it said. In a bid to stem the leak, Tepco injected about 6,000 liters of "water glass," or sodium silicate, and another agent around a seaside pit located near the plant's No. 2 reactor water intake, through which the highly radioactive water had been leaking heavily. The leak has apparently seriously contaminated the marine environment, as a seawater sample taken near the water intake Saturday showed a radioactive iodine-131 concentration of 7.5 million times the maximum level permitted under law.

The government is tightening radiation exposure levels currently used to designate an evacuation zone around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, as the crisis triggered by last month's massive earthquake and tsunami continues. "The current standards represent safety in the event of absorbing a huge amount of radiation in a short period," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at a news conference, noting some changes may be necessary as residents near the plant are at risk of absorbing radiation over an extended period. The government's Nuclear Safety Commission is proposing the government tighten the limit to 20 millisieverts from the current 50 millisieverts. Currently the government says outside radiation levels over 50 millisieverts requires evacuation, and advises residents to remain indoors when levels exceed 10 millisieverts.

KPFA Weekend News Anchor Anthony Fest: California has two operating nuclear power plants, San Onofre in Orange County, and PG&E's Diablo Canyon Plant in San Luis Obispo County, on the Central Coast.   Both are on the coastline and both are built near earthquake faults.  State Senator Alex Padilla has called for a special hearing at the State capitol on April 14 to examine the risks the two aging plants might pose.  KPFA's Ann Garrison has the story. PG&E's Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant on the California Coast KPFA/Ann Garrison: For the past five years the San Luis Obispo-based Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility has been urging California legislators and oversight agencies to require peer reviewed seismic studies to measure the risk of earthquake damage to Pacific Gas and Electric's (PG&E's) nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon and Southern California Edison's plant at San Onofre. The California Energy Commission has requested that the California Public Utilities Commission require PG&E do the latest, advanced 3-D studies on both old and new earthquake faults beneath Diablo Canyon before granting any ratepayer funding for its license renewal applications, but PG&E has opposed and fought the requirement to do the studies, and the CPUC has failed to act. Rochelle Becker, Executive Director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, says that Japan's worsening nuclear catastrophe could have been California's, and that Californians should be able to insist that the studies be done now.

The nuclear crisis at the Daiichi complex in Fukushima, Japan, has turned a spotlight on the severe dangers involved in storing spent nuclear fuel in pools. But the danger is not new. In 2003, I cowrote a report with a group of academics, nuclear industry executives, former government officials and other researchers warning that spent fuel pools at U.S. nuclear power plants were vulnerable. The drainage of a pool might cause a catastrophic radiation fire, we reported, which could render an area uninhabitable greater than that created by the Chernobyl accident (roughly half the size of New Jersey).

I watched this video click here earlier today on Russian TV in which Dr.Chris Busby, British scientist and expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation, says that what is most similar between Fukushima and Chernobyl is how much we are being lied to about the seriousness of the consequences. He actually said that Fukushima may be worse because of the high population in the area.  Sadly, I spent the rest of the day learning about one of the most evil and horrific scientific and political coverups of all time.

To-date, levels recorded at this monitor have been thousands of times below any conservative level of concern.

Three of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant experienced a jolt stronger than a worst case projection when hit by Japan's largest-ever earthquake March 11, provisional data by the operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. showed Friday. The data suggest that the intensity of the strongest earthquake projected could have been underestimated. The nuclear safety agency stopped short of describing the finding as a problem but urged the utility to analyze it in detail. According to the data, the lowest underground levels of the Nos. 2, 3 and 5 reactor buildings faced a seismic movement of 550, 507 and 548 gals in the east-west direction, respectively, and each figure exceeded the projected level. An official at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said that exceeding the projection ''does not immediately mean that there is a problem in the safety'' of the buildings because they still have resilience.

On March 24, 2011, a small unmanned drone flew over and photographed the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, giving a bird's eye view of the damage

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.

How did Japanese workers at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant jury-rig fire hoses to cool damaged reactors? Is contaminated water from waste pools overflowing into the Pacific Ocean? Exactly who is the national incident commander? The answers to these and many other questions are unclear to U.S. nuclear scientists and policy experts, who say the quality and quantity of information coming out of Japan has left gaping holes in their understanding of the disaster nearly two weeks after it began.

Prime minister urges vigilance after safety officials said break in nuclear reactor may have caused big radiation leak A suspected break in the core of a nuclear reactor could have been responsible for a leak of large amounts of radioactive contamination at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, Japanese nuclear safety officials said on Friday, in another setback to efforts to avert disaster at the stricken facility. The prime minister, Naoto Kan, described the situation at the plant as "very serious", while media reports said that two men who were injured while working on the plant's No.3 reactor on Thursday may have suffered internal exposure to radiation.

Companies that operate U.S. nuclear power plants are not telling the government about some equipment defects that could create safety risks, according to a report released Thursday. An audit by the inspector general of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also raised questions about the agency's oversight, saying reporting guidelines for the nuclear industry are "contradictory and unclear." Reflecting that confusion, the report said the NRC has not levied any civil penalties or significant enforcement actions against nuclear plant operators for lapses in reporting equipment defects in at least eight years. The study comes as questions are raised about the safety of U.S. nuclear facilities in the wake of the nuclear crisis in Japan. The NRC voted Wednesday to conduct two safety reviews of the 104 nuclear reactors operating in the U.S. Unless the NRC takes steps to improve its reporting guidelines, "the margin of safety for operating reactors could be reduced," the IG report said.

RADIOACTIVE IODINE RELEASES FROM JAPAN'S FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI REACTORS MAY EXCEED  THOSE OF THREE MILE ISLAND BY OVER 100,000 TIMES Institute Calls for More Intensive Contingency Planning by Japanese Authorities; U.S. Should Move as Much Spent Fuel as Possible to Dry Storage to Reduce Most Severe Risks and Suspend Licensing and Relicensing during Review

The Japanese electricians who bravely strung wires this week to all six reactor buildings at a stricken nuclear power plant succeeded despite waves of heat and blasts of radioactive steam. The restoration of electricity at the plant, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, stirred hopes that the crisis was ebbing. But nuclear engineers say some of the most difficult and dangerous tasks are still ahead - and time is not necessarily on the side of the repair teams.

Year 2011 marks the 25th anniversary of the day that changed the fate of millions of people around the world. On April 26, 1986 the Chernobyl disaster occurred. Bellona, 10/11-2010 We want people to remember once again the immense danger that nuclear power plants contain. We want all the people in the world to remember the Chernobyl disaster. There are still people that have never heard of it but need to know. We invite you to join the international action "Chernobyl-25". We offer people around the world to share the memory of the Chernobyl disaster on the day of the disaster.