Group items tagged

“None of the (hypothetical) claims examiners had names like this. It was like ‘Jane Doe.’ Bland names, which is appropriate (for the tone of a training manual),” said Jerison, whose father, Mound physicist James Goode, died in 1960 at age 36. After a six-year process, Jerison helped her mother win survivor benefits, but her mother died in 2008 before the money arrived.In a letter to Labor officials, chemist David Manuta of Waverly, a member of the Alliance of Nuclear Worker Advocacy Groups, called the humor “examples of (a) history of disrespect” for applicants.Manuta also criticized the “shameful comments” in May of program Director Rachel Leiton, who, according to a meeting transcript, told an advisory board that sick workers couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth in affidavits about their work history at atomic plants. Many cases involve decades-ago employment for which records are hard to find.

The politics of oversight. Regulatory apparatuses tend to degrade over time -- especially in political systems such as America's, which tend to facilitate the corporate capture of government functions. Thanks to the leverage afforded by campaign donations and the revolving door between public and private employment, industries have become extremely skillful at inserting their former employees, future employees, and other allies into the very regulatory agencies that oversee them. A brilliant piece of investigative journalism on the Securities and Exchange Commission in the latest issue of Rolling Stone shows how this can reduce a regulatory agency to an empty husk. Whether it's the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the Food and Drug Administration, the story is the same: Government agencies that started off as aggressive watchdogs have become absorbed over time by those over whom they have titular oversight. Americans recently saw the dire consequences of this trend in the banking meltdown of 2008.

Overwhelmed by speed and complexity. As Charles Perrow argues in his influential book Normal Accidents, which was inspired by the Three Mile Island accident, human operators function well in environments of routinized normality; but, when highly complex technical systems function in unpredicted ways -- especially if the jagged interactions between subsystems unfold very rapidly -- then the human capacity for cognitive processing is quickly overwhelmed. In other words, if a reactor is veering toward an accident caused by the failure of a single system in a way that operators have been trained to handle, then they are likely to retain control. But, if the accident-in-the-making involves unforeseen combinations of failures unfolding quickly and requires improvised responses rather than routinized ones, the outcome is far less hopeful.

The wild card. Finally, human nature being what it is, there are always the wild cards: people who kill romantic rivals via nuclear meltdown, freelance experimenters, terrorists, operators who should never have made it through personnel screening, operators who are drunk on the job, operators whose performance has declined through laziness, depression, boredom, or any host of reasons.

The bottom line: Nuclear safety is threatened by human as well as technical malfunctions, and the risk of disaster can only be attenuated through attention to the principles of social engineering as well as nuclear engineering. While human behavior can always overflow the bounds of our plans for its containment, there are measures that can at least lower the risk of a nuclear disaster caused by human factors: First, the nuclear industry needs to do more to both protect and reward whistle-blowers; and, second, the industry needs regulators with a genuine desire to exercise oversight -- rather than people hoping to increase their income by later going to work for the very companies that they were regulating. Unfortunately, this goes against the ethos of the contemporary United States, where the trend-lines are going in the wrong direction.

NOTHING happend to the fuel in the pools at Fukushima. I would like to see some evidence other than the word of an activist who frightens kids for a living to support Gunter’s rant about peices of fuel being ejected miles away. From the looks of that video, the fuel didn’t move an inch. There is also a poll associated with the article. The poll discloses that it is completely unscientific, since it allows anyone to vote and is not based on randomly selected participants. However, I think that the results as of 0315 this morning are pretty amusing since the antinuclear opinion piece has been posted for nearly a week.

95% disagree with “Beyond Nuclear”. Let’s make it 99% by Rod Adams on October 14, 2011 in Antinuclear activist, Politics of Nuclear Energy, Unreliables, Wind energy Share0 One of the more powerful concepts that I studied in college was called “groupthink.” The curriculum developers in the history department at the US Naval Academy thought it was important for people in training to become leaders in the US Navy learn to seek counsel and advice from as broad a range of sources as possible. We were taught how to avoid the kind of bad decision making that can result by surrounding oneself with yes-men or fellow travelers. The case study I remember most was the ill fated Bay of Pigs invasion where virtually the entire Kennedy Administration cabinet thought that it would be a cakewalk. If Patricia Miller had bothered to do the fact-checking required by journalistic integrity she would have come across this video showing 30 feet of water above the fuel at Fukushima with all of the fuel bundles exactly where they’re supposed to be.Aside: Don’t we live in an amazing world? I just typed “Bay of Pigs groupthink” into my browser search box and instantly hit on exactly the link I needed to support the statement above. It even cites the book we used when I was a plebe in 1977, more than 33 years ago. End Aside. Not everyone, however, has the benefit of early leadership lessons about the danger of believing that a small group of likeminded people can provide actionable advice. Some of the people who are most likely to be victims of groupthink are those who adamantly oppose the continued safe operation of emission-free nuclear power plants. The writers who exclusively quote members of that tiny community have also fallen into the groupthink trap.  On October 8, 2011, the Berkeley Patch, a New Jersey based journal that regularly posts negative stories about Oyster Creek, featured an article titled Petitioners to NRC: Shut Down All Fukushima-Like Nuclear Plants . Here is a snapshot of the masthead, the headline and the lede. The article is a diatribe that quotes people on the short list of frequently quoted antinuclear activists including Paul Gunter, Michael Mariotte, Kevin Kamps, Deb Katz and Dale Bridenbaugh. The author faithfully reproduces some of their best attempts to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt using untruths about the actual events at Fukushima. For example, the article uses the following example of how antinuclear activists are still trying to spread the myth that the used fuel pools at Fukushima caught fire. Oyster Creek – the oldest nuclear plant in the United States – has generated over 700 tons of high-level radioactive waste, Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear said. “Granted that some of that has been moved into dry cast storage, but the pool remains full to its capacity,” Kamps said. “And this was a re-rack capacity. Much later in terms of quantity of high level radioactive waste than it was originally designed for.” This represents 125 million curies of radioactive cesium-137 and the NRC has reported that up to 100 percent of the hazardous material could be released from a pool fire, Kamps said. “I would like to point out that Fukushima Daiichi units one, two, three and four combined in terms of the inventory of high level radioactive waste in their storage pools does not match some of these reactors I mentioned in terms of how much waste is in these pools,” Kamps said. “So the risks are greater here for boil downs and the consequences of a radioactive fire in these pools.” Fortunately, the people who are not a part of the antinuclear community are finally beginning to recognize their own strength and to realize that they do not have to remain silent while the lies are being spread. Here is how a knowledgable commenter responded to the above segment of the article: If Patricia Miller had bothered to do the fact-checking required by journalistic integrity she would have come across this video showing 30 feet of water above the fuel at Fukushima with all of the fuel bundles exactly where they’re supposed to be.

“It took a really extraordinary event for 95 percent of the people in the world to know about it,” he said. “If they know about Fukushima, they know about Mark 1 reactors exploding in the air and releasing toxic radiation across the world and they know that’s not a good thing. Something has to be done to make sure that never happens again.” I could not let that one pass without a comment; I am quite sure that Mariotte has once again fallen victim to the fact that he surrounds himself with people who echo his own prejudices. Here is my response.

Marriotte makes an interesting statement by he claiming that “95% of the people in the world” know about Fukushima. That statement might be true about the people in the United States, where advertiser-supported television news programs covered the events with breathless hype for several months. I am pretty sure that you would have a difficult time finding anyone in China, central Africa, the Asian subcontinent, South America or the Middle East who can even pronounce Fukushima, much less know anything about GE Mark 1 containments. Most of them would not even know that they should be worried about radiation because they have never been taught to be afraid of something that they cannot smell, feel, taste, or hear especially when it occurs at levels that have no chance of making them sick within their expected lifetime. Mariotte, Gunter, Kamps, Katz and Bridenbaugh are all members of a vocal, but tiny group of people who have been carrying the water of the fossil fuel industry for decades by opposing nuclear energy, the only real competitor it has. They are victims of groupthink who believe that their neighbors in Takoma Park are representative of the whole world.

Just before making this comment, I voted in the unscientific poll associated with the article. 95% say that Oyster Creek should keep on powering New Jersey homes and businesses. They are not impressed by the Beyond Nuclear FUD; they like clean electricity.

Workers who relocated the material fell ill simply from inhaling the fumes, Carpenter said. Department of Energy officials said none of the material has leaked outside the outer steel wall or the concrete casing that surrounds the structure, and there is no present hazard to workers or groundwater. They said they were trying to determine whether the material leaked from the inner tank or oozed from a nearby pit into the space between the two walls, known as the annulus. "There's no evidence of it leaking the liquid from the inner shell right now," Gamache said. The material – a mound 2 feet by 3 feet by 8 inches -- is dry and doesn't appear to be growing. It was discovered during a routine video inspection of the annulus conducted last month from a viewpoint not normally used. The possibility that it could have come as overflow from a nearby pit arises because a pipe runs into the annulus from the pit, Gamache said.

But Carpenter, who has talked extensively with workers at Hanford and was briefed Tuesday by one of the Department of Energy's senior officials at the tank farm, said he believed the evidence was strong that there was a leak. "I know Hanford would like it not to be so. But the people I'm talking to at the Hanford site say, no, it really does look like a leak," he said.

"From what I'm being told and looking at the pictures, it appears it's coming from under the tank and going up. Which is a far cry from it coming from the pit." Gamache said an initial sample of the material revealed that "the contamination levels were higher than expected" and it definitely contained radioactive waste. "There wasn't enough material to fully characterize the material, so we're preparing to pull another sample. That will probably happen around the mid-September time frame," she said. Carpenter said that if the inner tank leaked, it would probably prompt the need to reevaluate expectations that the tanks could safely act as interim storage vessels for several decades.

Is it possible that the ringed seals traveled to a contaminated area? They do, after all, have quite a range. Experts could not be reached the Friday before Christmas to explain migratory routes for Alaska's estimated stock of 250,000 ringed seals. Or did they eat prey contaminated by radiation? If there is a link to Fukoshima, the lab will find it, said Kelley.

There’s the MOX factor to consider too, the addition of MOX fuel is not included in the model. MOX fuel in reactor 3 may have played a role in the speed of the meltdown and adds plutonium and related isotopes into the releases different than what would be seen with uranium fuel. The report in English, includes a series of PowerPoint slides at the end. *This report also talks at length about ways radiation is absorbed by people, they may not be included in the Japanese language report.

Apparently Noguchi was not aware of the fact that the radiation has to wash somewhere, and it is likely that wherever it ends up will end up accumulating from other hot spots, spreading to wider areas and concentrating in even greater hot-spots.  But the cesium in the dirt is a big problem when its undetected on sports fields where children play, because Noguchi doesn’t think  people will purposefully eat it, but who has ever gotten dirt in their mouth when playing baseball, or is that not ‘eating’ the dirt? Last month, a local government in a Tokyo ward found a pile of composted leaves at a school that measured 849 becquerels per kilogram of cesium 137, over two times Japan’s legally permissible level for compost.

And on Wednesday, civilians who tested the roof of an apartment building in the nearby city of Yokohama — farther from Fukushima than Tokyo — found high quantities of radioactive strontium. Japanese nuclear experts and activists have begun agitating for more comprehensive testing in Tokyo and elsewhere, and a cleanup if necessary. Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert and a former special assistant to the United States secretary of energy, echoed those calls, saying the citizens’ groups’ measurements “raise major and unprecedented concerns about the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.”

The reports of hot spots do not indicate how widespread contamination is in the capital; more sampling would be needed to determine that. But they raise the prospect that people living near concentrated amounts of cesium are being exposed to levels of radiation above accepted international standards meant to protect people from cancer and other illnesses. Source: www.clearingandsettlement.com, via Nuclear News | What The Physics?

An advertising company in Tokyo won the contract, which is estimated at 70 million yen ($913,000). The project started this month and will likely continue until March. The agency said the Internet is overrun by discussions that are often unsubstantiated. One example, it said, is a posting that recommended mouthwash containing iodine as a safeguard against possible exposure to radiation.

Upon identifying erroneous information, the agency will carry at its website "correct information" in a Q&A format after consulting with experts. The agency will not demand that the original texts and postings be deleted. It will also not ask for the posters' identity. But the agency's new project drew fire on the Internet immediately after it was announced.

Some blasted it as suppression of free speech. Others criticized the government for trying to weed out information that it deems unfavorable, at the same time it appears ill-equipped to send out information properly and in a timely manner.

The Japan Federation of Bar Associations denounced the project in a statement on July 29, arguing it threatens to infringe on freedom of speech. "The government will likely restrict free discussions by unilaterally criticizing what it regards as 'inaccurate' and imperil freedom of expression," said the statement released under the president's name.

Kazuo Hizumi, a lawyer who compiled the statement, raised doubts about the legitimacy of government surveillance. "Many people look to online information because they do not trust what the government says," he said. "Providing accurate information is what the government is supposed to do in the first place; not spending money on a project to interfere with circulation of information."

This is as much as they detected in March,and there was no detection of cesium 137,so some people recognize it to be an error. http://savechild.net/archives/9208.html However,just like after the rain in March,yellow powder was found in North Kanto area,where Utsunomiya is.

“Good evening! I’m in Saitama.(North to Tokyo) I got soaked up in the rain twice yesterday,I couldn’t help it. I’ve been suffering from headache since last night.Today I feel sick slightly too. I feel fatigue in the evening recently.have unclear sight too. piles of hair get off from head as well. I’m concerned..” In Utsunomiya,where is south west to Fukushima,they measured 330 Mbq/km2 of cesium 134.

http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20110922-00000554-san-soci There are also a lot of the forum posts to report illness after touching the rain too.

n March,the yellow powder phenomena was found everywhere after the rain too.(around 3/24) http://www.tostem-fc.jp/blog.php?post_cmd=kosin&post_blogdir=5000457&post_eid=153277

In March,Japanese government explained it was pollen or yellow sand from China,but strangely,nobody had ever seen it before though pollen and yellow sand fly every year. The yellow powder was found in Chernobyl too. It looks “like” cesium powder actually.