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Reactor 1 of Tsuruga Nuclear Power Plant in Tsuruga City, Fukui Prefecture, operated by Japan Atomic Power Company, is the very first light-water reactor (by GE) built in Japan, and the 7th oldest commercial reactor in the world (as of January 2012).

(Fukushima I Nuke Plant's Reactor 1 is the second oldest, after Tsuruga's Reactor 1.) Reactor 2 of Tsuruga Nuclear Power Plant (pressurized-water reactor by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries) may be sitting on top of an active fault. Both reactors have been stopped due to scheduled maintenance.

Japan Atomic Power Company announced on August 17 that they found cracks and discoloration in 9 metal covers that cover fuel assemblies in Reactor 1 at Tsuruga Nuclear Power Plant (Tsuruga City, Fukui Prefecture) which has been stopped [for maintenance]

In another indication of the power of last week's magnitude-5.8 earthquake, officials at North Anna Power Station said yesterday that 25 of 27 vertical steel casks that hold highly radioactive spent fuel shifted on their pads.

Richard Zuercher, spokesman for Dominion power's nuclear operations, said none is leaking, all are intact, and there is no danger to the public or plant employees. "The earthquake did move, slightly, some of the dry storage casks on the pad," he said. The steel casks, which weigh up to 115 tons when loaded, shifted between an inch and 4 inches. "We're evaluating whether we need to move them back," Zuercher said.

Other newer steel and concrete casks that sit horizontally on pads sustained some minor "cosmetic" damage, Zuercher said. "Everything there is intact and easily fixable." Thirteen of those casks also contain spent fuel. The fuel for North Anna's two reactors is enriched uranium dioxide, compressed into small ceramic pellets and stacked in metal-alloy tubes called fuel rods.

Savannah River Site scientists are working to identify a strange growth found on racks of spent nuclear fuel collected from foreign governments. The “white, stringlike” material was found among thousands of spent fuel assemblies submerged in deep pools within the site’s L Area, according to a report filed by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal oversight panel. “The growth, which resembles a spider web, has yet to be characterized, but may be biological in nature,” the report said. Savannah River National Laboratory collected a small sample in hopes of identifying the mystery lint – and determining whether it is alive.

L Area, with 3-foot-thick concrete walls, includes pools that range from 17 to 30 feet deep, where submerged racks are used to store an array of assemblies – some containing highly enriched uranium – from foreign and domestic research reactors. The material is kept there for national security reasons. The safety board’s report said the initial sample collected was too small to allow further characterization.

First, the Tokyo government didn't tell anyone that they started dumping the radioactive ashes in the landfill in the Tokyo Bay in May. And now, without bothering asking the citizens, again, it will start bringing the disaster debris from Tohoku that are likely to be radioactive and burn in Tokyo.

NHK News (9/29/2011):

The Tokyo Metropolitan government has decided to bring in the disaster debris from Iwate prefecture to Tokyo and burn them, and will sign an agreement with the Iwate prefectural government on September 30.

Nearly four months after a tsunami-triggered crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant on the other side of Japan, Hayashi -- who grew up with reactors in her hometown and married a nuclear engineer -- has deep doubts, but no answers.

"I never thought it was completely safe. Nothing made by man is perfect. But it supported us," Hayashi said, speaking quietly in a cafe in Tsuruga city, host to three of 14 reactors that dot the coast of the Fukui region -- nicknamed the "Atomic Arcade" because it has more reactors than any other region in Japan.

"I think it would be good to abandon nuclear power, but what would we have to do to achieve that?" said the 59-year-old Hayashi

astel Yamada is 73 years old. He seems a little tired after weeks on the road in the United States. He is trying to save Japan. One of the first people I have met who can tell the inside story of the Fukushima accident, Yamada is concerned that work is not being done on the three nuclear reactors that melted down last year because the high radiation levels are still keeping TEPCO workers away. The crippled buildings are unstable, still contain nuclear assemblies, and present a long term threat to the people in the area. The cooling systems especially are a cause for concern. Mr. Yamada, founder and president of the Skilled Veterans Corps for Fukushima (Fukushima Genpatsu Kodotai), along with 700 members, want to help clean up the site.

Beyond cleanup of the site, Mr. Yamada doesn’t believe TEPCO has the technological capabilities to deal with the long term issues. TEPCO, he says, doesn’t believe this either. TEPCO’s plan, according to Yamada, is to contain the radiation in the next 40 years. He estimates they will need 50 years or perhaps much longer

Fish taken from a lake in northern Vermont had similar levels of strontium-90 and cesium-137 as fish taken from the Connecticut River near Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. During a Feb. 3 meeting of the House Fish, Wildlife and Water Resources Committee in the Vermont Statehouse, committee members heard from Bill Irwin, chief of radiological health for the Vermont Department of Health. "We got preliminary results from our fish sample analysis from Lake Carmi in northern Franklin County," Irwin told the Reformer on Monday. Irwin said Lake Carmine, in Enosburg Falls, is about as far away from Yankee as you can get and still be in the Green Mountain State. "The results are that cesium-137 and strontium-90 in Lake Carmi fish is in the same range as Connecticut River fish," said Irwin. "We take this as some evidence that all fish in Vermont are likely to have radioactive cesium and strontium at these levels and that, as we've hypothesized, it is from nuclear weapons fallout and the releases of Chernobyl. All of us are glad to have proof and not just conjecture." The fish taken from Lake Carmi were small-mouth bass, he said, and were taken from the lake by Vermont Fish and Wildlife fisheries personnel. Cesium was found in both edible and inedible portions of the bass, he said, while strontium was found only in inedible portions, which include bones, the head, fins and scales. "There's no danger in eating the fish," said Irwin. "Should we ever find that there are reasons to restrict diet from any sampling for any kind of radioactive or toxicological events, we would keep in mind different cultures have different diets."

In the same analyses, the fish had almost 500 times more potassium-40 in them than they do cesium-137, he said. Potassium-40 is a naturally occurring radioactive material that is in nearly everything and was created when the planet was formed billions of years ago, said Irwin. A fish taken from the Connecticut River in 2010 had the highest levels of strontium-90 in bone that his department has seen in any samples. "In that same sample we did find very low but measurable amounts of strontium-90 in the meat of the fish," said Irwin, which could have been a sampling or contamination error. "But we don't know that." The sampling is part of an ongoing multi-state operation to help determine what is the level of the two radioactive isotopes in fish in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York. "We hope to further populate this data with fish taken from waters unaffected by nuclear power plants," said Irwin. The states are also working with the a Food and Drug Administration laboratory in Winchester, Mass., to develop sampling and analysis protocols. When more data has been assembled from around the region, Irwin said they hope to publish it in scientific journals. The results of the sampling from Lake Carmi will be posted soon on DOH's website, he said. When this year's fishing season begins, Fish and Wildlife personnel will be taking more fish for the Department of Health.

According to TEPCO's press release on 8/8/2012, the balloon couldn't pop out onto the operating floor (5th floor) because it was stopped by a cable on the 4th floor. The balloon did take photographs of the 4th floor. The purpose of the survey (not fulfilled by this project) was to see what the 5th floor was like, in order to prepare for the future removal of fuel assemblies from the Spent Fuel Pool. (See my post from July 23, 2012.)

5 TEPCO employees and 14 affiliate company workers did the work, for about 35 minutes, receiving maximum 1.54 millisievert for the shortened work.

Purpose The investigation was conducted to understand the current condition of Unit 1 operating floor (5th floor) and provide inputs to the consideration of fuel removal from the spent fuel pool.

Of all the lies that came out of the Gulf disaster, the most preposterous has been the 3 leaks on the riser story. Figure 165-0a to 165-0c were the first few schematic illustrations of BP’s blowout incident. They were so embarrassingly stupid and logic defying, most experts believed the schematics were deliberately drawn by cartoonists to confuse the average Joe Public. The patchwork of realities resembled a makeshift car hastily assembled from parts of different size vehicles. Obviously a mini car body does not match the oversize truck tires. It is obvious the 5½ inch drill pipe at leak(3) cannot be the same 21inch diameter riser (actually a well casing) at leak(2). Yet the world's technical experts willfully overlooked this fundamental discrepancy and allowed the criminals to get away with murders. And America, the world's greatest nation shouting human rights abuses all over the world, allowed this hideous crime of mass destruction in its own backyard to go unpunished? In China, the corporate criminals responsible for this environmental carnage would have been executed instead of having their lives back. Can the 11 dead crewmen, their young families and thousands of Gulf victims who suffered numerous medical problems from the toxic contaminated Gulf waters and corexit sprayed on them, ever have their lives back?

Surely the world's most technologically advanced country could not have been so easily fooled by this “3 wells & 3 leaks on a single riser” fairy tale (concocted Beyond Phantasm). Besides the many controversial circumstances surrounding the sinking of the burning rig (DWH) and the sudden breaking of the super-strong riser in calm water, how could a third open-ended leak (3) be even possible beyond the completely severed riser at the second leak (2)? See fig165-0c. Leak(2) has to be the blown crater of well no.#3 as illustrated in many of our previous articles and irrefutably shown in Figure 165-5 with the right coordinates in the few undoctored videos.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” S Homes.

Scientists have been producing nuclear fusion reactions from muon catalysed fusion for decades – just not consistently, or in sufficient volumes for it to be considered a viable energy source – until now. Star Scientific Limited is perfecting a world-first technique to economically produce pions, and hence muon catalysed fusion, in a CONTROLLED and SUSTAINED way. They are developing a method to efficiently and consistently produce pions (which immediately decay to become muons) in their hundreds and thousands, meaning the loss of some muons is of no consequence.

(H/T Talk Polywell) Energy input versus output is an issue with plasma fusion, not muon catalysed fusion. Plasma fusion consumes 18 times more energy than it produces. The Star Scientific system requires very little energy to run, which means 99% of the energy liberated by the fusion reaction is available for use.

They are claiming that they have a low energy input pion factory. If 100 times more heat is produced than the energy input, then the heat can be converted to electricity that is 30 times more than the input energy. Muon catalyzed fusion at wikipedia Stephen Horvath has been working on Muon catalyzed fusion for decades.

Part 2: Workers Pushed to Their Limits TEPCO is preparing to spend decades in J-Village. Workers have spread gravel around the large soccer stadium and in a number of adjacent areas. Here they have placed row after row of gray trailers. There are 40 per row and they sit two stories high, extending right up to the blue plastic seats in the stands. The stadium's large scoreboard still hangs behind this makeshift community. The stadium clock has stopped at 2:46 p.m., which was the moment when the earthquake cut off the electricity here and at the power plant 20 kilometers (12 miles) away. Now, the power is on again and white neon lights illuminate the rows of trailers. In one room the workers can pick up bento boxes. Next door TEPCO has built a laundromat with more than a hundred washing machines. Behind the main building in J-Village, buses are parked on the former soccer fields and debris is stored in large plastic bags on the tartan track.

Stacks of Contaminated Suits In the courtyard of the main building, TEPCO has had a small store built, where workers can purchase cigarettes and tea. Some of them, still wearing their work overalls, have gathered around a number of ashtrays and are smoking in silence. There is an Adidas advertisement glued to one of the doors and an obsolete warning sign: "No SPIKES!" An exhausted worker is asleep on the floor in the hallway.

In the window of the atrium hang huge banners for TEPCO Mareeze, the soccer team that belongs to the energy company. In the center of the building stands a panel with a large white and green map of J-Village. There was a time when this was there to help athletes find their way around. Now, a man in a TEPCO uniform stands here and uses a red felt pen to post the current radiation levels for over a dozen different places on the premises. Three TEPCO employees are sitting nearby with their laptops. The workers hand them their daily dosimeters. In return, they are given a receipt that resembles a cash register sales slip and shows the dose of radiation that they have received that day.

The apartment building is located in the same Kohoku-ku in Yokohama City where 63,000 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium was found also from the rooftop of another apartment building, and 42,000 becquerels/kg was found from the dirt around the side drain on the road.It looks like this person had the dirt on the rooftop tested on his own, and posted the test result sheet on his blog.Cesium-134: 49,900 becquerels/kgCesium-137: 55,700 becquerels/kgTotal radioactive cesium: 105,600 becquerels/kg

Meanwhile, this is how the Yokohama City workers (or the contract workers) "cleaned" the highly contaminated (42,000 becquerels/kg cesium) dirt from the side of the road. No protection, no masks, no rubber boots.

Yokohama City Assembly recently voted down the citizens' petition asking the city not to accept radiation-contaminated disaster debris from Tohoku by the majority vote by the DPJ and LDP and Komei Party.The city temporarily halted the dumping of radioactive sludge ashes into the ocean as the citizens' protests were fast and furious once they knew about the scheme, but the mayor in the press conference took pains to emphasize that only thing that had gone amiss was that the city officials under her clearly didn't "explain" well enough to the Yokohama residents living in the area around the final dumping site in Minami Honmoku Pier in advance. "We should have explained better to soothe the fear and anxiety of the residents", she said.

Although the "Atoms for Peace" campaign was formally launched in 1957, corporate America began to promote peaceful uses of atomic energy as early as the first few months after Hiroshima. A Is For Atom, an artifact of this effort, takes this highly loaded and threatening issue straight to the public in an attempt to "humanize" the figure of the atom.A Is For Atom speaks of five atomic "giants" which "man has released from within the atom's heart": the warrior and destroyer, the farmer, the healer, the engineer and the research worker. Each is pictured as a majestic, shimmering outline figure towering over the earth. "But all are within man's power Ñ subject to his command," says the narrator reassuringly, and our future depends "on man's wisdom, on his firmness in the use of that power."General Electric, a long-time manufacturer of electric appliances, power generation plants, and nuclear weapon components, is staking a claim here, asserting their interest in managing and exploiting this new and bewildering technology. Its pitch: this is powerful, frightening, near-apocalyptic technology, but managed with firmness, it can be profitable and promising. This "Trust us with the control of technology, and we'll give you progress without end" pitch resembles what we've seen in films like General Motors' To New Horizons (on the Ephemeral Films disc). But the automobile, of course, wasn't a weapon of mass destruction.

In its first two years of release, A Is For Atom was seen by over seven million people in this version and a shortened ten-minute theatrical cut. In 1953 it won first prizes in both the Columbus (Ohio) and Turin (Italy) Film Festivals, the Freedoms Foundation Award, an "oscar" from the Cleveland Film Festival, and a Merit Award from Scholastic Teacher. In 1954 it won first prize in the Stamford Film Festival, a Golden Reel Award from the American Film Assembly, and a second Grand Award from the Venice Film Festival. The film was remade in the mid-sixties and is still available for rental.Like other John Sutherland films, A Is For Atom presents a portentious message in a visually delightful and often self-deprecating manner. "Element Town" and its quirky inhabitants, including hyped-up Radium and somnolent Lead, is unforgettable, and the animated chain reaction manages to avoid any suggestion of nuclear fear.

Sixteen tons and what you get is a nuclear catastrophe. The explosions that rocked the Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant were more powerful than the combustion of hydrogen gas, as claimed by the Tokyo Electric Power Company. The actual cause of the blasts, according to intelligence sources in Washington, was nuclear fission of. warhead cores illegally taken from America's sole nuclear-weapons assembly facility. Evaporation in the cooling pools used for spent fuel rods led to the detonation of stored weapons-grade plutonium and uranium.   The facts about clandestine American and Israeli support for Japan's nuclear armament are being suppressed in the biggest official cover-up in recent history. The timeline of events indicates the theft from America's strategic arsenal was authorized at the highest level under a three-way deal between the Bush-Cheney team, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Elhud Olmert's government in Tel Aviv.

Tokyo's Strangelove   In early 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney flew to Tokyo with his closest aides. Newspaper editorials noted the secrecy surrounding his visit - no press conferences, no handshakes with ordinary folks and, as diplomatic cables suggest, no briefing for U.S. Embassy staffers in Tokyo.   Cheney snubbed Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma, who was shut out of confidential talks. The pretext was his criticism of President George Bush for claiming Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The more immediate concern was that the defense minister might disclose bilateral secrets to the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were sure to oppose White House approval of Japan's nuclear program.

Abe has wide knowledge of esoteric technologies. His first job in the early 1980s was as a manager at Kobe Steel. One of the researchers there was astrophysicist Hideo Murai, who adapted Soviet electromagnetic technology to "cold mold" steel. Murai later became chief scientist for the Aum Shinrikyo sect, which recruited Soviet weapons technicians under the program initiated by Abe's father. After entering government service, Abe was posted to the U.S. branch of JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization). Its New York offices hosted computers used to crack databases at the Pentagon and major defense contractors to pilfer advanced technology. The hacker team was led by Tokyo University's top gamer, who had been recruited into Aum.   After the Tokyo subway gassing in 1995, Abe distanced himself from his father's Frankenstein cult with a publics-relations campaign. Fast forward a dozen years and Abe is at Camp David. After the successful talks with Bush, Abe flew to India to sell Cheney's quadrilateral pact to a Delhi skeptical about a new Cold War. Presumably, Cheney fulfilled his end of the deal. Soon thereafter Hurricane Katrina struck, wiping away the Abe visit from the public memory.