nuke.news

"The total area contaminated with radiation from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is estimated at about 800 square kilometers, or about 40 percent the size of Tokyo, according to a radiation map created by the science ministry and U.S. Department of Energy. The report uses the same level of contamination (555,000 becquerels or higher of cesium-137) that was used to issue compulsory evacuation orders in the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. To determine whether the current evacuation zone is appropriate or when residents can return home, the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan plans to set up focal sites to heighten its monitoring of the possible further spread of radioactive contamination. "

" Workers at the Grand Gulf Nuclear Plant in Port Gibson, Miss., last Thursday released a large amount of radioactive tritium directly into the Mississippi River, according to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and experts are currently trying to sort out the situation. An investigation is currently underway to determine why the tritium was even present in standing water found in an abandoned unit of the plant, as well as how much of this dangerous nuclear byproduct ended up getting dumped into the river. Many also want to know why workers released the toxic tritium before conducting proper tests. The Mississippi Natchez Democrat reports that crews first discovered the radioactive water in the plant's Unit 2 turbine building after heavy rains began hitting the area last week. Unit 2 was a partially-constructed, abandoned structure that should not have contained any radioactive materials, let alone tritium, which is commonly used to manufacture nuclear weapons and test atomic bombs (http://www.nirs.org/radiation/triti...)."

"If Illinois were a country, it would have the world's 12th-largest number of nuclear power reactors, behind China and ahead of Sweden. No other U.S. state generates more energy through fission. Exelon Corp. (EXC), which operates all 11 of the state's reactors, is no stranger to President Barack Obama. The Chicago- based company has served as a source of campaign contributions and also created environmental and political challenges to navigate. Even as his administration reviews all U.S. reactors following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that triggered radiation leaks from a crippled Japanese plant, Obama last week called nuclear power an "important part" of his energy agenda. That mirrors the balancing act he displayed in his adopted home state, which generates more than a tenth of U.S. nuclear power."

Online blog covering nuclear news

"*"The only safe nuclear reactor is 93-Million miles away, the Sun". Daniel Hirsch, President of Bridge the Gap, a Nuclear policy organization. (1) *"There is No 'Peaceful' atomic power. If (you are) promoting nuclear power you are promoting bombs". David Freeman. (2) *"There is no safe level of (radiation) exposure & there is no dose of radiation so low that the risk of a malignancy is zero". (3) Even exposure to background radiation causes some cancers. (4) "

DOE/NISA unclassified Fukushima Dosimetry reports pdf presentations

"Radioactive caesium and iodine has been deposited in northern Japan far from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, at levels that were considered highly contaminated after Chernobyl. The readings were taken by the Japanese science ministry, MEXT, and reveal high levels of caesium-137 and iodine-131 outside the 30-kilometre evacuation zone, mostly to the north-north-west. Iodine-131, with a half-life of eight days, should disappear in a matter of weeks. The bigger worry concerns caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years and could pose a health threat for far longer. Just how serious that will be depends on where it lands, and whether remediation measures are possible. The US Department of Energy has been surveying the area with an airborne gamma radiation detector. It reports that most of the "elevated readings" are within 40 kilometres of the plant, but that "an area of greater radiation extending north-west… may be of interest to public safety officials"."

"Radioactive leakage from fuel rods at a nuclear power plant in the city of Tsuruga in Fukui prefecture on Honshu island of Japan are believed to be the cause of a surge in the density of toxic substances detected in coolant water, the prefectural government said Monday. Japan Atomic Power Company, owner and operator of the potentially faulty nuclear plant, has said it will attempt to manually override the plant's No. 2 reactor's system in an effort to contain the leak and conduct further investigation into its critical cooling systems. The utility firm operating the 1,160-megawatt No.2 reactor at its Tsuruga nuclear plant cited "technical difficulties" at the reactor and while claiming there had been no radiation leak did confirm a possible leak of iodine from the reactor's nuclear fuel assemblies into its coolant system, adding a new saga to the nation's ever-unfolding nuclear crisis."

"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."

"he government of Japan has issued an official order to telecommunications companies and web masters to censor reports which contradict the state media reports that the Fukushima nuclear radiation disaster is over. Japan Government Officially Censors Truth About Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Disaster Japan Government Officially Censors Truth About Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Disaster The supposedly free democratic nation of Japan, which supposedly values and promotes freedom of speech, has officially issued orders to telecommunication companies and webmasters to remove content from websites that counter the official government position that the disaster is over and there is no more threat from the radiation."

"A high radiation level of 1,120 millisieverts per hour was detected within the damaged No. 1 reactor building at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant when robots photographed the area on April 26, it has been learned. The level is the highest detected in the reactor building to date. The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), plans to fill the nuclear reactor containment vessel with water to contain radiation emissions, and is trying to cool down the reactor, but the high levels of radiation in the building are hampering work and are likely to cause difficulties for the company in achieving its goal of bringing the crisis at the plant under control within "six to nine months.""

"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.""

If a nuclear power plant in the US were to have issues, who would be affected? In a partnership between Nature News and Columbia University, we now have a Google map that tells us the population sizes around plants so we can easily scan and see the number of people that could be affected should anything occur at the plants. The team Power Reactor Information System (PRIS) database run by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and Columbia University's NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center to map out in an easy-to-read way, the location and size of nuclear power plants as well as population numbers around those plants. On the map, population sizes are illustrated with circle size as well as color. Green circles represent less than 500,000 people and on the other side of the scale, red circles represent populations of over 20 million.

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

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.