nuke.news

The cost of generating nuclear power in Japan is one-third higher than Tokyo's last cost assessment in 2004 and 50 percent higher if compensation costs for the recent nuclear crisis are included, but still cheaper than fossil fuels, a study showed this week. The study by the country's top energy research firm could provide fodder for both sides of Japan's nuclear power debate, which is expected to heat up amid public wariness over nuclear safety despite the prospect of protracted power shortages. Lawmakers and officials are working to come up with a new energy policy after the Fukushima radiation crisis made it difficult, if not impossible, to build more reactors in the world's third-biggest nuclear generator. Prior to the crisis, as part of its effort to fight climate change, Japan planned to boost nuclear capacity to meet over half of electricity demand by 2030 by building 13 more reactors.

* Compensation covers damages until Aug 31 * Subsequent claims to be taken quarterly * First round of compensation does not cover property damage By Taiga Uranaka TOKYO, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Tokyo Electric Power unveiled the first details on Tuesday of how it would compensate Fukushima residents for lodging and other costs stemming from their evacuation of areas close to its crippled nuclear plant. The payments, due to reach victims in October, nearly seven months after the start of the nuclear crisis, mark just the first round in a series of state-supported outlays that some analysts estimate could climb as high as $130 billion. About 80,000 people were evacuated from a 20 kilometre radius around Tokyo Electric's Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been leaking radiation since a March 11 earthquake and tsunami triggered a meltdown of reactor cores.

Vines creep across Tomioka's empty streets, its prim gardens overgrown with waist-high weeds and meadow flowers. Dead cows rot where they were left to starve in their pens. Chicken coops writhe with maggots, a sickening stench hanging in the air. This once-thriving community of 16,000 people now has a population of one. In this nuclear no-man's land poisoned by radiation from a disaster-battered power plant, rice farmer Naoto Matsumura refuses to leave despite government orders. He says he has thought about the possibility of getting cancer but prefers to stay - with a skinny dog named Aki his constant companion. Nearly six months after Japan's catastrophic earthquake and tsunami, the 53-year-old believes he is the only inhabitant left in this town sandwiched between the doomed Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station to the north and another sprawling nuclear plant to the south.

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.

After struggling for months to repair production lines hammered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, a Saitama Prefecture-based maker of plastic containers threw in the towel. The damage had been overcome at its plant in Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, one of the company's main production centers. But it could not cope with consumer fears that its products, including lunch boxes, were contaminated with radiation spewed from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. "It will be difficult to restart the plant until the nuclear accident comes to an end," said a company official.

Nuclear power plants must provide updated estimates of how long it would take to evacuate nearby communities in an emergency under a new rule approved Tuesday by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Tweet 1 person Tweeted this ShareThis Plant operators would have to update their evacuation estimates after every 10-year census, or when changes in population would increase the estimated time by at least 30 minutes. The requirement was among several changes regulators approved regarding emergency preparedness. The changes came as the commission considered sweeping safety changes for the U.S. nuclear industry in response to the nuclear crisis in Japan.

Alarmist predictions that the long-term health effects of the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan will be worse than those following Chernobyl in 1986 are likely to aggravate harmful psychological effects of the incident. That was the warning heard at an international conference on radiation research in Warsaw, Poland, this week. One report, in UK newspaper The Independent, quoted a scientist who predicted more than a million would die, and that the prolonged release of radioactivity from Fukushima would make health effects worse than those from the sudden release experienced at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine. "We've got to stop these sorts of reports coming out, because they are really upsetting the Japanese population," says Gerry Thomas at Imperial College London, who is attending the meeting. "The media has a hell of a lot of responsibility here, because the worst post-Chernobyl effects were the psychological consequences and this shouldn't happen again."

The first comprehensive survey of soil contamination from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant showed that 33 locations spread over a wide area have been contaminated with long-lasting radioactive cesium, complicating Japan's effort to clean up the disaster-hit region, the government said Tuesday. The survey of 2,200 locations within a 100-km radius of the crippled plant found that those 33 locations had cesium-137 in excess of 1.48 million becquerels per square meter, the level set by the Soviet Union for forced resettlement after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Another 132 locations had combined amount of cesium 137/134 over 555,000 becquerels per square meter, the level at which the Soviet authorities called for voluntary evacuation and imposed a ban on farming.

The 11 March 2011 9.0 magnitude earthquake off Japan's northeast coast set off a series of cascading events which resulted in the deaths of more than 20,500 people along with an ongoing nuclear crisis. The crisis epitomized what disaster scholars call a compounded or complex disaster. The quake itself caused few direct casualties - fewer than 5 percent of the deaths due to this disaster are attributed to collapsed buildings - but triggered a devastating tsunami which overtopped seawalls, washed away entire villages, swept people and cars out to sea, and damaged the back-up cooling systems at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power complex. Of the six reactors on site, the quake's arrival automatically shut down the three which were operational. With diesel generators and batteries offline, the residual heat in the reactors raised the temperature to more than 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, melting down the zircaloy fuel rods. The fuel pellets, free from their sheaths, fell to the floor of the steel containment vessels where they may have burned holes through the thick steel plating. Nuclear authorities in Japan eventually classified the radiation release from the Fukushima nuclear complex as a level 7 nuclear crisis on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), placing the event in the same category as the 26 April 1986 Chernobyl accident in the Ukraine.

IWAKI, Fukushima Prefecture--A survey of more than 1,000 children and babies living near the quake-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has produced an alarming finding: 45 percent of them suffered internal exposure to radiation following the accident there. Most children absorbed relatively low levels of radiation in their thyroid glands, according to officials who explained the results to residents in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, on Aug. 17. Tests conducted in Iwaki city, Kawamata town and Iitate village between March 24 and 30 found that 26 percent of under-16s absorbed 0.01 microsievert per hour, while 11 percent absorbed 0.02 microsievert per hour. At least one child recorded radiation of 0.10 microsievert per hour, but officials said that level did not pose a health risk.

U.S. reactors have generated about 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel, of which 75 percent is stored in pools, according to Nuclear Energy Institute data. Spent fuel rods give off about 1 million rems (10,00Sv) of radiation per hour at a distance of one foot - enough radiation to kill people in a matter of seconds. There are more than 30 million such rods in U.S. spent fuel pools. No other nation has generated this much radioactivity from either nuclear power or nuclear weapons production. Nearly 40 percent of the radioactivity in U.S. spent fuel is cesium-137 (4.5 billion curies) - roughly 20 times more than released from all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. U.S. spent pools hold about 15-30 times more cesium-137 than the Chernobyl accident released. For instance, the pool at the Vermont Yankee reactor, a BWR Mark I, currently holds nearly three times the amount of spent fuel stored at Dai-Ichi's crippled Unit 4 reactor. The Vermont Yankee reactor also holds about seven percent more rad

It is one of the mysteries of Japan's ongoing nuclear crisis: How much damage did the March 11 earthquake do to the Fukushima Daiichi reactors before the tsunami hit? The stakes are high: If the quake structurally compromised the plant and the safety of its nuclear fuel, then every other similar reactor in Japan will have to be reviewed and possibly shut down. With virtually all of Japan's 54 reactors either offline (35) or scheduled for shutdown by next April, the issue of structural safety looms over the decision to restart every one in the months and years after. The operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) has been damaged by the crisis. On Tuesday it reported a 572 billion yen (US$7.4 billion) loss on clean-up charges and compensating people affected by the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear plant. TEPCO's share price is down about 80% since the day before the disaster struck.

It is one of the mysteries of Japan's ongoing nuclear crisis: How much damage did the March 11 earthquake do to the Fukushima Daiichi reactors before the tsunami hit? The stakes are high: If the quake structurally compromised the plant and the safety of its nuclear fuel, then every other similar reactor in Japan will have to be reviewed and possibly shut down. With virtually all of Japan's 54 reactors either offline (35) or scheduled for shutdown by next April, the issue of structural safety looms over the decision to restart every one in the months and years after.

"Japan's system to forecast radiation threats was working from the moment its nuclear crisis began. As officials planned a venting operation certain to release radioactivity into the air, the system predicted Karino Elementary School would be directly in the path of the plume emerging from the tsunami-hit Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant. But the prediction helped no one. Nobody acted on it. The school, just over six miles from the plant, was not immediately cleared out. Quite the opposite. It was turned into a temporary evacuation center."

"The head of Japan's banking lobby said on Thursday that Tokyo Electric could become insolvent if parliament fails to pass a bailout bill by the end of September, when the operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant closes books for the fiscal first half. Katsunori Nagayasu, chairman of the Japanese Bankers Association, told a regular news conference time is running out as the government panel on nuclear damages compensation is set to release guidelines around late July. "It will be known how much the compensation will be in rough figures, but if there is no (government) scheme for that then, Tokyo Electric could immediately become insolvent," he said. "And it will trigger a series of risks for the power industry and the markets and put a damper on Japan's reconstruction efforts," he said. "

"The sun has only just risen in Iwaki-Yumoto when groups of men in white T-shirts and light blue cargo pants emerge blinking into the sunlight, swapping the comfort of their air-conditioned rooms for the fierce humidity of a Japanese summer. Four months on from the start of the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, this hot-spring resort in north-east Japan has been transformed into a dormitory for 2,000 men who have travelled from across the country to take part in the clean-up effort 30 miles away at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Iwaki-Yumoto has come to resemble corporate Japan in microcosm. Among its newest residents are technicians and engineers with years of experience and, underpinning them all, hundreds of labourers lured from across Japan by the prospect of higher wages. They include Ariyoshi Rune, a tall, wiry 47-year-old truck driver whose slicked-back hair and sideburns are inspired by his idol, Joe Strummer. For five days a week, Rune is in thrall to the drudgery of life as a "nuclear gypsy", the name writer Kunio Horie gave to contract workers who have traditionally performed the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs for Japan's power utilities."

"Revelations that radiation-contaminated rice straw used as feed for beef cattle was produced far away from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant have sent shockwaves through the livestock farming community in Fukushima Prefecture. Consumers have also been filled with a sense of growing distrust in the government over delays in responding to the problem of radiation-tainted beef. Forty-two beef cows that ate rice straw contaminated with radioactive cesium were found to have been shipped from a livestock farm in the Fukushima Prefecture town of Asakawa from April 8. The rice straw had been supplied by a farmer in Shirakawa, about 75 kilometers away from the tsunami-hit nuclear power station."

"The emergency evacuation preparation zone between 20 and 30 kilometers from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant may be scrapped by the end of next month, it was learned Thursday. The government will soon set preconditions for eliminating the zone and start discussions with local governments, as the Step 1 phase to stably cool the plant's reactors has been generally achieved by the mid-July target in Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s timetable for bringing the troubled plant under control. People in the two sections of the emergency evacuation preparation zone have been asked by the government to make preparations to evacuate or stay indoors in the event of an emergency. Many residents in the zone already have left."

"Atsuko Ogasawara's family rejected offers of some ¥160 million for their property on the northern tip of Honshu during a two-decade bid to prevent construction of a nuclear plant. The result: Their fenced-in house is little more than a stone's throw from a facility that opens in 2014. News photo Subsidized: A fishing boat is moored last month in Oma, Aomori Prefecture. BLOOMBERG PHOTO The family's protest illustrates the challenges facing opponents when they go up against the nuclear industry, a pillar of Japanese energy policy since the late 1960s. Ogasawara says her mother faced harassment that included letters from local authorities and neighbors pressuring her to sell, unidentified men following her and anonymous phone calls that included a threat to sabotage the family's fishing boat."

"The situation seems to have stabilized somewhat at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant after four months of fears and uncertainties--and an early spewing of radioactive materials that spread to 12 prefectures. But Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the plant, and government officials still face a host of problems. Early damage to the plant continues to present a risk of further radioactive leaks. And questions remain over the actual extent of damage to human health and the environment from the estimated 770,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials released into the air so far from the damaged reactors. The amount from the Fukushima plant is more than 10 percent of the 5.2 million terabecquerels discharged during the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. "