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“You can’t always get what you want,but if you try,you might find,you get what you need.” Japanese politicians finally got radiation. According to the local radiation survey on 10/1/2011,the area around Japanese diet is obviously hot spot. In front of Tokyo station, 0.267 uSv/h In front of Imperial Palace, 0.676 uSv/h Mud in Diet, 0.456 uSv/h Dust in Hibiya park, 0.457 uSv/h In front of Tepco’s head office, 0.463 uSv/h cf.Nishiyama ,House of Councillors President nearly fainted at the Diet. says,he’s suffering from severe canker sore,and he can’t sleep recently. He sometimes loses his words at the Diet.

http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20110930-00001244-yom-pol

Testimony by Professor Tatsuhiko Kodama of Tokyo University continues. He goes back to Minami Soma City where his Radioisotope Center has been helping to decontaminate.We at the Radioisotope Center of Tokyo University have been helping to decontaminate Minami-Soma City, sending about 4 people at a time and doing decontamination work for the length of 700km per week.Again, what's happening to Minami-Soma clearly shows that 20 or 30 kilometer radius [from the nuke plant] doesn't make any sense at all. You have to measure in more detail like measuring each nursery school.

Right now, from the 20 to 30 kilometer radius area, 1,700 school children are put on the buses to go to school. Actually in Minami-Soma, the center of the city is located near the ocean, and 70% of the schools have relatively low level of radiation. Yet, children are forced to get on the school buses to go all the way to schools near Iitate-mura [where radiation is higher], spending 1 million yen everyday for the busing.

I strongly demand that this situation be terminated as soon as possible.What's most problematic is the government's policy that they will compensate the residents for the moving cost only if their areas are designated as official evacuation zones. In a recent committee held at the House of Councilors [Upper House], President Shimizu of TEPCO and Mr. Kaieda, Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry answered that way. I ask you to separate the two immediately - compensation criteria issue and children's safety issue.

While readings of radiation in the air have returned to pre-3/11 levels in most areas of Japan — not including areas close to the plant and the so-called hot spots — the contamination of soil, which affects the food chain, could pose a long-term health risk, experts say. Iodine-131, cesium-134 and cesium-137 were released in large quantities by the nuclear plant, and if they are accumulated in the body, they could cause cancer.

Kunikazu Noguchi, lecturer at Nihon University and an often-quoted expert on radiological protection, assures that consumers need not worry too much about any produce on the market, because at present, radiation levels in most vegetables, meat, dairy and other foods, even those from Fukushima Prefecture, are far below the government's safety limits and often undetectable. But for consumers concerned about the few incidents of tainted food slipping through the government checks (such as the beef from cattle that had been fed with tainted straw in Fukushima, which was shipped nationwide in July), or families with small children, Noguchi suggests a simple way to minimize their radiation exposure through food: rinse it.

rinsing the food well before cooking, preferably with hot water, and/or boiling or stewing it, a large portion of radioactive elements can be removed. In his book, published in Japanese in mid-July, "Hoshano Osen kara Kazoku wo Mamoru Tabekata no Anzen Manyuaru" ("The Safety Manual for Protecting Your Family From Radiation Contamination"), Noguchi offers tips on how to prepare food, item by item, so consumers can reduce their radiation intake at home.

On August 26, 2011, Prime Minister Kan Naoto resigned from office after a tempestuous fifteen months in power. Since May 2011 a virtual lynch mob egged on by the media bayed for his resignation. Kan’s ouster became an obsession of the nation’s powerbrokers. This article examines why, in the midst of an unprecedented cascade of disasters, natural and nuclear, the Kan problem trumped all others.

The fiercely partisan politics of the complex Tōhoku catastrophe has slowed action on recovery and discredited politicians of all political stripes. The public views Diet members with growing contempt because too many politicians seem to have prioritized petty party politics over reconstruction and safety of the victims. In early June 2011, while nearly 100,000 evacuees languished in evacuation centers, and with relatively little progress towards recovery in many battered coastal communities or controlling the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, the Diet devoted its energy to a no-confidence motion to oust Prime Minister Kan Naoto. Naturally, the public was dismayed by this unproductive vendetta at a time when the nation was looking for substantial emergency measures. Polls taken at the time of the no-confidence motion showed that a vast majority of Japanese did not think ousting Kan was a pressing priority even though he was unpopular. In the court of public opinion, the verdict on national politicians is dereliction of duty.

On the eve of 3/11, PM Kan looked to be on his way out as scandals sullied his administration and he plunged in public opinion polls. In the wake of the multiple disasters, Kan enjoyed a brief bounce in public support and a lull in the escalating vilification by the media and political opponents in the Diet. Within a month, however, this fragile solidarity unraveled and it was back to politics as usual featuring internecine sniping by the Ozawa Ichiro wing of Kan’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and shrill criticism coupled with stonewalling of many legislative initiatives by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

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.

Professor Kodama is the head of the Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo.Professor Kodama's anger is now directed toward the government's non-action to protect people, especially children and young mothers, from internal radiation exposure. His specialty is internal medicine using radioisotope, so he says he has done the intense research on internal radiation:

I have been in charge of antibody drugs at the Cabinet Office since Mr. Obuchi was the prime minister [1998-]. We put radioisotopes to antibody drugs to treat cancer. In other words, my job is to inject radioisotopes into human bodies, so my utmost concern is the internal radiation exposure and that is what I have been studying intensely.

The biggest problem of internal radiation is cancer. How does cancer happen? Because radiation cuts DNA strands. As you know, DNA is in a double helix. When it is in a double helix it is extremely stable. However, when a cell divides, the double helix becomes single strands, doubles and becomes 4 strands. This stage is the most vulnerable.

Participants at the breakfast meetings were executives of nine electric power companies, excluding Okinawa Electric Power Co., and LDP lawmakers or their aides. Many of the Diet members were mid-ranking lawmakers and were engaged in issues related to the industry ministry. At election time, the executives visited lawmakers’ offices and handed cash donations to them or their aides. An aide to a lawmaker said, “In some cases, an amount ranging from two million yen to three million yen (about $25,000 to $37,500) was contained in each envelope.” Executives of electric power companies also wined and dined lawmakers in ryotei once a year. Presidents of those firms sometimes joined in the parties.

In another example, according to an aide to a Lower House lawmaker, the Diet member, whose hobby is fishing, knew that there was a prime fishing spot at a pier in the compound of a TEPCO-operated thermal power plant. The lawmaker told a TEPCO employee, “I want to go fishing there.” Then, the employee immediately obtained permission for the lawmaker to fish at the site. When the Lower House member arrived by car at an entrance to the plant on a weekend night, executives of the plant greeted the lawmaker, and led the lawmaker to the spot. At the location, another TEPCO employee, who was holding a light, was waiting for the lawmaker with a bucket for him to wash his hands.

starting this week, which marks the beginning of a new fiscal year, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) and the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan (NSC) have no budget. The new nuclear regulatory agency that was supposed to begin operations on April 1 in NISA's stead is now floundering amid resistance in the Diet from opposition parties. In other words, government agencies overseeing nuclear power now have an even more diminished presence.

According to Japan's general budget provisions, funds for a new government organization can be diverted to existing government organizations if the money is being used for its original purpose. The situation doesn't do much for morale, however. Back-scratching relationships between government ministries, the indecision of both the ruling and opposition parties, and the unchanging fact that much of the current crisis is still left in the hands of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) remains the same

One of the biggest issues that we face is the possibility that the spent nuclear fuel pool of the No. 4 reactor at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant will collapse. This is something that experts from both within and outside Japan have pointed out since the massive quake struck. TEPCO, meanwhile, says that the situation is under control. However, not only independent experts, but also sources within the government say that it's a grave concern.

MINAMISOMA, Japan - The lugubrious notes of Silent Night wafted from an outdoor sound system on the near-empty main street to the station of this coastal city on the northern edge of the 20-kilometer "exclusion zone" around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

At a factory that salvages old and wrecked cars just outside the barriers on the road down the coast to the plant, a digital display in the office flashed the numbers -0.10 and 0.22 - highs and lows of micro-sieverts. "That’s well within the safety limit," a young woman in the factory's overseas marketing department assured me. "We are safe here." For all such assurances, though, nobody really believes bad stuff <a href='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a53e495a&cb=INSERT_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE' target='_blank'> <img src='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=36&cb=INSERT_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE&n=a53e495a' border='0' alt=''></a>  is no longer floating through the clear cold air or lapping up on the innocent looking shores beyond the concrete breakwater over which 40-foot waves surged that day, wiping out an entire district down the slope from the factory.

Radioactive substances come from the ground, from the river bottom."

While the battle goes on to bring the Fukushima No. 1 plant under control, the government moved a step closer Friday to resuming exports of Japan's nuclear technology as a Lower House committee approved ratification of accords with four countries. The Democratic Party of Japan and Liberal Democratic Party both voted in favor of the bilateral agreements with Jordan, Vietnam, South Korea and Russia at the Lower House Foreign Affairs Committee. The full chamber was to vote on the pacts later Friday, but at the request of opposition parties the action was postponed till Tuesday. Despite the delay, the treaties are expected to be approved by the Lower House and will likely clear the Upper House before the current Diet session closes Dec. 9.

"I think that above all, it is our duty to share our experience, the lessons, and knowledge of the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant with the world," Noda said. "I think it is meaningful to provide (nuclear technology) with high-level safety while grasping the situation of the other countries." Noda also suggested nuclear plants may be exported to countries other than those four in the future if more seek Japanese technology despite the March 11 accident. "For countries that say they need Japan's technology, we will deal with and decide each case individually," he said.

A ‘smoking gun’ article is one that reveals a direct connection between a fossil fuel or alternative energy system promoter and a strongly antinuclear attitude. One of my guiding theories about energy is that a great deal of the discussion about safety, cost, and waste disposal is really a cover for a normal business activity of competing for market share.

This weekend, I came across a site called Culture Change that provides some strong support for my theory about the real source of strength for the antinuclear industry. According to the information at the bottom of the home page, Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.Jan Lundberg, who has led the organization and its predecessor organizations since 1988, grew up in a wealthy family with a father who was a popular and respected petroleum industry analyst.

Lundberg tells an interesting story about his initial fundraising activities for his new non-profit group.Setting out to become a clearinghouse for energy data and policy, we had a tendency to go along with the buzzword “natural gas as a bridge fuel” — especially when my previous clients serving the petroleum industry until 1988 included natural gas utilities. They were and are represented by the American Gas Association, where I knew a few friendly executives. Upon starting a nonprofit group for the environment with an energy focus, I met with the AGA right away. I was anticipating one of their generous grants they were giving large environmental groups who were trumpeting the “natural gas is a bridge fuel” mantra.

From Twitpic of Massahisa Sato, member of the Upper House of the Japan's Diet. Bags of radioactive ashes from the garbage incinerating plant are piled up high right near an apartment building in Fukushima City. He says some of the residents in the apartment building have evacuated for the fear of radiation coming off that pile. (Click the photo to enlarge to see the details.)

On a separate, culturally-correct "rumor", the Japan Buddhist Federation may be planning to organize a nationwide ceremony whereby the debris in the disaster-affected areas in Tohoku will be burned to pray for the spirit of the dead at its member temples throughout Japan.

Some 100,000 people are still living as evacuees away from their homes in the wake of the severe accidents at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Kyodo News has reported that some 17,000 children in Fukushima Prefecture have changed schools or kindergartens because of radiation fears. Of these children, some 8,000 moved out of the prefecture.

Given this situation, it is imperative that the central government vigorously push the work of decontaminating areas contaminated with radioactive substances released from the nuclear power reactors. The central and local governments also should provide psychological care to both children who moved to new schools or kindergartens and children who have remained at their schools and kindergartens.

The Diet is expected to soon enact a special law under which the central government will be responsible for disposing of highly radioactive rubble and sludge, and decontaminating radioactive soil. In some cases, the central and local governments will carry out decontamination work together. The cost will be shouldered by Tepco.

The amount of radioactive cesium ejected by the Fukushima reactor meltdowns is about 168 times higher than that emitted in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the government's nuclear watchdog said Friday.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency provided the estimate at the request of a Diet panel but noted that making a simple comparison between an instantaneous bomb blast and a long-term accidental leak is problematic and could lead to "irrelevant" results.

The report said the crippled Fukushima No. 1 plant has released 15,000 terabecquerels of cesium-137, which lingers for decades and can cause cancer, compared with the 89 terabecquerels released by the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda pledged Sept. 13 to come up with a new basic energy policy by next summer to reduce the nation's dependence on nuclear energy. Noda, making his first policy speech, said: "It is unproductive to perceive energy policy as a confrontation between those who call for a move away from nuclear energy and those who promote nuclear energy."

He also indicated he would allow a resumption of operations at nuclear reactors that were shut down for periodic inspections as long as the safety of the reactors has been confirmed. Noda also said an advisory panel, bringing together representatives of business, the bureaucracy and academia, would be in place by the end of the year to help compile a strategy for the revitalization of Japan as well as other key policy areas.

Noda's address was to the extraordinary Diet session that convened Sept. 13 and will last only four days. Opposition parties bristled at the shortness of the session. And in an unusual move, a vote had to be taken in the Lower House plenary session to settle the duration of the session.

The Italian nuclear engineer and safety expert Cesare Silvi explains why he left his former pro-nuclear stance for solar and other renewable energy sources: “I soon came to the conclusion that neither international cooperation nor technological advancements would guarantee human societies to build and safely run nuclear reactors in all possible conditions on Earth (earthquakes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, wars, terrorism, climate change, tsunamis, pandemics, etc.). I am sadly reminded of this turning point in my life as I listen to the news about the earthquake, tsunami and extremely worrying nuclear crisis in Japan.”

Silvi warns that “there will definitely be worse accidents” if we continue with nuclear power: “Why not consider Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima as warnings of greater catastrophes to come and avoid the inevitable by shutting them down, much like changing your diet and/or lifestyle after finding out that your cholesterol or blood pressure is elevated, rather than continuing down the same path until a heart attack or stroke strikes?” According to Silvi the world could easily replace nuclear power simply by reducing our energy usage and introducing energy efficiency programs: “Nuclear today only generates about 12 percent of the developed world’s electricity. By instituting an energy efficiency program,” Silvi suggests, “we could fill the gap caused by shutting them all down and put this malevolent genie back into the bottle.”

His latest book, "Fukushima Meltdown: The World's First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster," has just become available online as a Kindle book in an excellent and fluid translation by a team under the guidance of American author and scholar, Douglas Lummis. Originally published as "Fukushima Genpatsu Merutodaun" by Asahi Shinsho on May 30, 2011, this is the book that Hirose had hoped he would never have to write. For three decades he has been warning Japanese people about the catastrophes that could been visited on their country — and now his worst nightmare has become a reality. "This is called the '3/11 Disaster' by many," he writes, "but it did not happen on 3/11, it began on 3/11 and it is continuing today. ... Nuclear power plants are a wildly dangerous way to get electricity and are unnecessary. The world needs to learn quickly from Japan's tragedy." Hirose points out that from day one of the disaster the situation in Fukushima had reached the highest level of nuclear accidents, namely level 7 — and from the outset, the government was keenly aware of this fact. But it chose to conceal the truth from the people.

"In past nuclear-plant disasters — those at Chernobyl (in present-day Ukraine, in 1986) and at Three Mile Island (in Pennsylvania in the United States, in 1979) — only one reactor was involved in each. However, at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, four reactors went critical at the same time." On March 13, two days after the tsunami that followed the magnitude-9 Great East Japan Earthquake, Masataka Shimizu, the president of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), the operator of the stricken nuclear plant, said at a press conference: "The tsunami was beyond all previous imagination. In the sense that we took all measures that could be thought of for dealing with a tsunami, there was nothing wrong with our preparations." As Hirose and many other commentators have pointed out, Tepco executives and government planners knew perfectly well that tsunamis far exceeding 20 meters in height struck that very region in 1896 and again, 37 years later, in 1933. The 14-meter-high tsunami that inundated many of the Fukushima No. 1 plant's facilities was, in fact, well within the parameters of what could objectively be termed "expected" — and was simply not "beyond all previous imagination," as Shimizu claimed.

In fact, the willful absence of care by both industry and government comprises nothing less than a blatant act of savagery against the people of Japan. This book is full of enlightening technical explanations on every aspect of nuclear safety, from structural safeguards (and their clear inadequacy) to the nature of hydrogen explosions and meltdowns. Hirose warns us, with detailed descriptions of the lay of the land and the features of each reactor, about the nuclear power plants at Tomari in Hokkaido, Higashidori in Aomori Prefecture and Onagawa in Miyagi Prefecture; about other plants in Ibaraki, Ishikawa, Shimane, Ehime, Saga and Kagoshima prefectures; and perhaps most dangerous of all, about the 14 reactors along the Wakasa Coast in Fukui Prefecture, constituting what I would call Hōshanō Yokochō (Radioactivity Alley). Many of the reactors at these plants are aging and plagued with serious structural problems.