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Residents in the radiation danger zone, instructed to stay inside their homes, are venturing out in search of food and fuel. A Japanese businessman in the country's northeast tells Joan Juliet Buck how government incompetence is killing people who escaped the earthquake.

Writer, cultural critic, and actor Joan Juliet Buck wrote to a foreign-born Japanese friend in the food business to ask him how we in America could help Japan. Below is his answer. Tellingly, he does not want to be identified

“As you are a journalist,” he wrote back, “first I would like to explain how the Japanese government and bureaucrats are incompetent against the crisis.”

Why did such massive amounts of radioactive substances escape from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant? Why did explosions tear through its reactor buildings? Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s interim report on the accident at the nuclear plant shed some light on some causes of the nation's worst-ever nuclear crisis, but these and other crucial questions remain unanswered. The release of radioactive substances is believed to have peaked on the morning of March 15. As radiation spewed from the plant's reactors, residents in an extensive area--even as far as Iitatemura, Fukushima Prefecture, about 30 kilometers from the plant--were forced to evacuate.

The report said the air pressure in the containment vessel of the plant's No. 2 reactor dropped drastically that morning. However, TEPCO says the causal relationship between the pressure drop and the radioactive release is "unclear at this moment." It had been assumed that a blast in the pressure control chamber below the No. 2 reactor's containment vessel caused the increase in radiation leaked into the environment. Analysis of data from a seismometer and other equipment at the complex later showed this hypothesis was incorrect.

The report's verification of TEPCO's initial response to the nuclear accident also lacked details. After a hydrogen blast wrecked the No. 1 reactor building shortly after 3:30 p.m. on March 12--a development nobody had anticipated--TEPCO scrambled to prevent similar blasts from occurring at the other reactors.

The official journal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), "Canadian Medical Association Journal" is a peer-reviewed scientific journal. On their website, there is an article dated December 21, 2011 which severely criticizes the Japanese government's response (or lack thereof) to the nuclear disaster which has just been declared "over" by the current Noda administration.Written by Lauren Vogel of CMAJ quoting medical experts, the article states:The Japanese government has been "lying through their teeth" ever since the March 11 accident;The Japanese government hasn't disclosed enough information for the citizens to make informed decision, with “extreme lack of transparent, timely and comprehensive communication”;

The response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster by the Japanese government is far worse than the response to the Chernobyl accident by the Soviet Union government;The annual radiation exposure limit for the general public of 20 millisieverts is "unconscionable", and there has been no government "in recent decades that's been willing to accept such a high level of radiation-related risk for its population"

As if the closing steel mills and automobile manufacturing plants weren't bad enough, some of the oldest, most risky atomic reactors in the U.S. are located in the Midwest. Worse still, they are on the shores of the Great Lakes, putting at risk the drinking water supply for 40 million people downstream in the U.S., Canada, and a large number of Native American First Nations. Altogether, 33 atomic reactors are located on the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Two of the most infamous of these radiologically risky "Rust Belt reactors" are Entergy Nuclear's Palisades in southwest Michigan, and FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse in northwest Ohio.

Last month, U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), a long-time watchdog on the nuclear industry, wrote the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) about an acidic, radioactive leak representing a "crisis in the control room at the Palisades nuclear power plant." The leakage had been ongoing for a year, and was being "contained" in glorified buckets referred to by Entergy PR spokesman Mark Savage as "catch basins." Although the leak came to light when Palisades was forced to shutdown after its rate reached more than 30 gallons per day, it had been ongoing for months at a rate of 15 gallons per day. The tritiated and borated water is leaking from a 300,000 gallon Safety Injection Refueling Water storage tank, which is safety critical for both reactor core and radiological containment cooling. Whistleblowers contacted Washington, D.C. attorney Billie Pirner Garde, who alerted Rep. Markey, who wrote NRC. The NRC Office of Investigations has launched a probe into potential Entergy wrongdoing. On July 17th, NRC issued a "Confirmatory Action Letter" which enables Palisades to keep operating into 2013, even if the leak increases to nearly 38 gallons per day!

Markey demanded a copy of an internal Entergy report surveying its own workers on "safety culture" at Palisades. Michigan Radio obtained a copy, which reveals "a lack of accountability at all levels," and a workforce deeply distrustful of management, fearful that they will be harassed and punished if they dare to raise safety concerns.

Tokyo – Takeo Hayashida signed on with a citizens’ group to test for radiation near his son’s baseball field in Tokyo after government officials told him they had no plans to check for fallout from the devastated Fukushima …

Then came the test result: the level of radioactive cesium in a patch of dirt just yards from where his 11-year-old son, Koshiro, played baseball was equal to those in some contaminated areas around Chernobyl. The patch of ground was one of more than 20 spots in and around the nation’s capital that the citizens’ group, and the respected nuclear research center they worked with, found were contaminated with potentially harmful levels of radioactive cesium. “Everybody just wants to believe that this is Fukushima’s problem,” said Kota Kinoshita, one of the group’s leaders and a former television journalist. “But if the government is not serious about finding out, how can we trust them?”

Kaoru Noguchi, head of Tokyo’s health and safety section, however, argues that the testing already done is sufficient. Because Tokyo is so developed, she says, radioactive material was much more likely to have fallen on concrete, then washed away. She also said exposure was likely to be limited.

The staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently produced a list of safety improvements that might be undertaken at American nuclear plants in light of the Fukushima disaster in Japan. On Tuesday, the nuclear industry focused on two elements that were conspicuous by their absence.

In a presentation to Wall Street analysts, Marvin Fertel, the president and chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, emphasized that spent fuel pools at the Fukushima Daiichi plant had “survived the accident quite well.”Early in the crisis, which began with an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, American regulators feared that water in one of the pools had almost completely boiled off, and the American Embassy in Tokyo advised Americans to stay 50 miles away. But “the pools may turn out to be a much better story at Fukushima than people envisioned,’’ Mr. Fertel said.

Noting that fuel pools at American reactors have far more radioactive material in them than the ones at Fukushima, the accident focused new attention on the idea of moving spent fuel out of the pools and into dry casks, Something already done at most American reactors when they run out of space.That idea first came to prominence after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

TEPCO has just released "diaries" from early in the accident giving us a better view of the sequence of events from the operators point of view.

The bulk of the materials, distributed on discs with digital files, show reams of raw numerical data. They include photos of broadsheet computer printouts and other formatted charts with thousands of data points for measurements of reactor heat, pressure, water levels, fuel rod positions and the status of cooling pumps, among other functions. Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, also released a smaller batch of more recent documents highlighting its various efforts to restore electric power to each of the reactors, a task that was achieved on April 26. But a series of what Tepco terms reactor "diaries" from the first 48 hours after the quake include the most visually arresting materials. These feature snapshots of whiteboards on which plant employees—11 of whom remained in each of the plant's three control rooms—jotted down status updates on the progress of the reactor shutdowns and steadily increasing radiation levels around the facility.

Using red, black or blue ink markers, the plant operators appear to have scribbled down the notes quickly. Many are smudged or illegible. Others depict complex diagrams and are peppered with technical jargon or acronyms such as SBO for "station blackout." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281504576329011846064194.html

Scientists and doctors are calling for a new national policy in Japan that mandates the testing of food, soil, water, and the air for radioactivity still being emitted from Fukushima's heavily damaged Daiichi nuclear power plant."How much radioactive materials have been released from the plant?" asked Dr Tatsuhiko Kodama, a professor at the Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology and Director of the University of Tokyo's Radioisotope Centre, in a July 27 speech to the Committee of Health, Labour and Welfare at Japan's House of Representatives. "The government and TEPCO have not reported the total amount of the released radioactivity yet," said Kodama, who believes things are far worse than even the recent detection of extremely high radiation levels at the plant. There is widespread concern in Japan about a general lack of government monitoring for radiation, which has caused people to begin their own independent monitoring, which are also finding disturbingly high levels of radiation. Kodama's centre, using 27 facilities to measure radiation across the country, has been closely monitoring the situation at Fukushima - and their findings are alarming.According to Dr Kodama, the total amount of radiation released over a period of more than five months from the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster is the equivalent to more than 29 "Hiroshima-type atomic bombs" and the amount of uranium released "is equivalent to 20" Hiroshima bombs.

Kodama, along with other scientists, is concerned about the ongoing crisis resulting from the Fukushima situation, as well as what he believes to be inadequate government reaction, and believes the government needs to begin a large-scale response in order to begin decontaminating affected areas.Distrust of the Japanese government's response to the nuclear disaster is now common among people living in the effected prefectures, and people are concerned about their health.Recent readings taken at the plant are alarming.When on August 2nd readings of 10,000 millisieverts (10 sieverts) of radioactivity per hour were detected at the plant, Japan's science ministry said that level of dose is fatal to humans, and is enough radiation to kill a person within one to two weeks after the exposure. 10,000 millisieverts (mSv) is the equivalent of approximately 100,000 chest x-rays.

t is an amount 250 per cent higher than levels recorded at the plant in March after it was heavily damaged by the earthquake and ensuing tsunami. The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), that took the reading, used equipment to measure radiation from a distance, and was unable to ascertain the exact level because the device's maximum reading is only 10,000 mSv. TEPCO also detected 1,000 millisieverts (mSv) per hour in debris outside the plant, as well as finding 4,000 mSv per hour inside one of the reactor buildings.

Transcript Excerpts A report from 1987 and it is entitled “NRC Coziness With Industry”. That is not my name for it, that is the congressional report’s name, “The NRC’s Coziness With Industry.” And it is written by the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs of the United States Congress. In the 1990′s [...] I brought some safety concerns forward to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and they were ignored. And in the process, discovered a very cozy relationship between the regulator and the people that they were attempting to regulate. It went to congressional hearings with John Glenn and in the congressional hearings the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this: “It is true. Everything Mr. Gundersen said was absolutely right. He performed quite a service.” Nothing changed after that hearing. What he said to Congress had no affect on the way the agency was behaving. There is an excellent journalism piece out and it is in the Austin Chronicle. It is investigative journalism at its very best and it is called, “Will Shill For Nukes.” The author of it discovered that an industry group, NEI, the industry trade organization, was writing opinion pieces and they were then giving those opinion pieces to professors around the country and asking those professors of nuclear engineering at universities around the country, they were asking those professors to put those in the local newspapers. Well, quite a few professors obliged

he current electricity rate-setting system.

conversations have been popping up about thorium in recent years and how it can be a game-changer in the energy industry. Thorium has incredible potential as an ultra-safe, clean, and cheap nuclear energy source which can power the world for millennia.

Thorium is found naturally in rocks in the form of thorium-232, and has a half-life of about 14 billion years. Estimates by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) show it is about three times more common in the Earth's crust than uranium. It can be obtained through various methods, most commonly through the extraction from monazite sands. Known reserves of thorium are not well-known due to lack of exploratory research. The US Geological Service estimates that the USA, Australia, and India hold the largest reserves. India is believed to have the lion's share of thorium deposits. In the United States, Idaho contains a large vein deposit. The world has an estimated total of 4.4 million tons

A newly created organization known as the Weinberg Foundation has taken up the cause of promoting thorium energy. The foundation was named after Dr. Alvin Weinberg, a nuclear energy researcher in the 1960s who laid out the vision of safe and abundant thorium power. He pioneered the Molten Salt Reactor using thorium in its liquid fuel form at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This reactor had an inherently safer design and dramatically reduced the amount of atomic waste in comparison to typical nuclear reactors. Unfortunately, the thorium reactor program was not fully pursued due to political and military reasons.

As the full cost of the Fukushima nuclear accident continues to climb—Japanese officials now peg it at $64 billion or more—nuclear power’s future is literally headed south. Developed countries are slowing or shuttering their nuclear-power programs, while states to their south, in the world’s hotspots (think the Middle East and Far East), are pushing to build reactors of their own. Normally, this would lead to even more of a focus on nuclear safety and nonproliferation. Yet, given how nuclear-reactor sales have imploded in the world’s advanced economies, both these points have been trumped by nuclear supplier states’ desires to corner what reactor markets remain.

This spring, Germany permanently shut down eight of its reactors and pledged to shutter the rest by 2022. Shortly thereafter, the Italians voted overwhelmingly to keep their country nonnuclear. Switzerland and Spain followed suit, banning the construction of any new reactors. Then Japan’s prime minister killed his country’s plans to expand its reactor fleet, pledging to reduce Japan’s reliance on nuclear power dramatically. Taiwan’s president did the same. Now Mexico is sidelining construction of 10 reactors in favor of developing natural-gas-fired plants, and Belgium is toying with phasing its nuclear plants out, perhaps as early as 2015.

China—nuclear power’s largest prospective market—suspended approvals of new reactor construction while conducting a lengthy nuclear-safety review. Chinese nuclear-capacity projections for the year 2020 subsequently tumbled by as much as 30 percent. A key bottleneck is the lack of trained nuclear technicians: to support China’s stated nuclear-capacity objectives, Beijing needs to graduate 6,000 nuclear experts a year. Instead, its schools are barely generating 600.

In the No. 1 reactor, the overheated fuel may have eroded the primary containment vessel’s thick concrete floor, and it may have gotten almost within a foot of a crucial steel barrier, the utility said the new simulation suggested. Beneath that steel layer is a concrete basement, which is the last barrier before the fuel would have begun to penetrate the earth. Some nuclear experts have warned that water from a makeshift cooling system now in place at the plant may not be able to properly cool any nuclear fuel that may have seeped into the concrete. The new simulation may call into question the efforts to cool and stabilize the reactor, but the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, says it is not worried more than eight months after the accident.

The findings are the latest in a series of increasingly grave scenarios presented by Tepco about the state of the reactors. The company initially insisted that there was no breach at any of the three most-damaged reactors; it later said that there might have been a breach, but that most of the nuclear fuel had remained within the containment vessels. “This is still an overly optimistic simulation,” said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor of physics at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute, who has been a vocal critic of Tepco’s lack of disclosure of details of the disaster. Tepco would very much like to say that the outermost containment is not completely compromised and that the meltdown stopped before the outer steel barrier, he said, “but even by their own simulation, it’s very borderline.” “I have always argued that the containment is broken, and that there is the danger of a wider radiation leak,” Mr. Koide said. “In reality, it’s impossible to look inside the reactor, and most measurement instruments have been knocked out. So nobody really knows how bad it is.”

Still, a spokesman for Tepco, Junichi Matsumoto, said Wednesday that the nuclear fuel was no longer eating into the concrete, and that the new simulation would not affect efforts to bring the reactors to a stable state known as a “cold shutdown” by the end of the year.    “The containment vessel as a whole is being cooled, so there is no change to our outlook,” Mr. Matsumoto said at a news conference. 

The EPA re-calibrated (rigged) Japan nuclear radiation monitoring equipment causing them to report lower levels of radioactive fallout after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown than what was detected before the disaster. I recently programmed an application to pull all of the EPA radiation monitoring graphs for all major US cities and complied them into an easy to use web interface. Of course we took the data being reported with a grain of salt under the suspicion that the Feds were fiddling with the results. Now, an investigative report looking into why the much of the EPA radiation monitoring equipment was offline when the Fukushima nuclear meltdown occurred reveals that EPA has in fact rigged radiation monitoring equipment to report lower values of radiation.

RadNet – the EPA’s front-line, radiological detection network is severely flawed and suffers from maintenance and reliability issues. The lack of consistent data and the number of units offline (a techie term for broken) at the time they were most needed shows that the EPA was not prepared for this emergency. Besides that fact the broken system left us all unprotected; the confusion, apprehension and fear witnessed as people try to wade through the incomplete and inaccurate data online is evidenced by an exchange on the UC Berkely website over this RadNet graph:

The graph shows that this monitoring station was one of the units actually running on  3/11 . The readings were significantly higher prior to 3/11 and drop to a much lower level  afterwards. This is an indication that the units were running in an uncalibrated condition and were adjusted only after the events at Fukushima. Who is responsible for assuring that the system is up and running?  The EPA contracted this responsibility to a private company, Environmental Dimensions, Inc.

From inspectors’ abandoning of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as it succumbed to disaster to a delay in disclosing radiation leaks, Japan’s response to the nuclear accident caused by the March tsunami fell tragically short, a government-appointed investigative panel said on Monday.

Officials of Japan’s nuclear regulator present at the plant during the quake quickly left the site, and when ordered to return by the government, they proved of little help to workers racing to restore power and find water to cool temperatures at the plant, the report said.

The panel attacked the use of the term “soteigai,” or “unforeseen,” that plant and government officials used both to describe the unprecedented scale of the disaster and to explain why they were unable to stop it. Running a nuclear power plant inherently required officials to foresee the unforeseen, said the panel’s chairman, Yotaro Hatamura, a professor emeritus in engineering at the University of Tokyo. “There was a lot of talk of soteigai, but that only bred perceptions among the public that officials were shirking their responsibilities,” Mr. Hatamura said.

During the 1970s and 1980s, at the peak of the nuclear reactor construction, organized groups of protestors mounted dozens of anti-nuke campaigns. They were called Chicken Littles, the establishment media generally ignored their concerns, and the nuclear industry trotted out numerous scientists and engineers from their payrolls to declare nuclear energy to be safe, clean, and inexpensive energy that could reduce America’s dependence upon foreign oil. Workers at nuclear plants are highly trained, probably far more than workers in any other industry; operating systems are closely regulated and monitored. However, problems caused by human negligence, manufacturing defects, and natural disasters have plagued the nuclear power industry for its six decades. It isn’t alerts like what happened at San Onofre that are the problem; it’s the level 3 (site area emergencies) and level 4 (general site emergencies) disasters. There have been 99 major disasters, 56 of them in the U.S., since 1952, according to a study conducted by Benjamin K. Sovacool Director of the Energy Justice Program at Institute for Energy and Environment  One-third of all Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant.

At Windscale in northwest England, fire destroyed the core, releasing significant amounts of Iodine-131. At Rocky Flats near Denver, radioactive plutonium and tritium leaked into the environment several times over a two decade period. At Church Rock, New Mexico, more than 90 million gallons of radioactive waste poured into the Rio Puerco, directly affecting the Navajo nation. In the grounds of central and northeastern Pennsylvania, in addition to the release of radioactive Cesium-137 and Iodine-121, an excessive level of Strontium-90 was released during the Three Mile Island (TMI) meltdown in 1979, the same year as the Church Rock disaster. To keep waste tanks from overflowing with radioactive waste, the plant’s operator dumped several thousand gallons of radioactive waste into the Susquehanna River. An independent study by Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina revealed the incidence of lung cancer and leukemia downwind of the TMI meltdown within six years of the meltdown was two to ten times that of the rest of the region.

Although nuclear plant security is designed to protect against significant and extended forms of terrorism, the NRC believes as many as one-fourth of the 104 U.S. nuclear plants may need upgrades to withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters, according to an Associated Press investigation. About 20 percent of the world’s 442 nuclear plants are built in earthquake zones, according to data compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The NRC has determined that the leading U.S. plants in the Eastern Coast in danger of being compromised by an earthquake are in the extended metropolitan areas of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chattanooga. Tenn. The highest risk, however, may be California’s San Onofre and Diablo Canyon plants, both built near major fault lines. Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, was even built by workers who misinterpreted the blueprints.  

Setting the scene for its revealing report on the plight of workers at Fukushima Daiichi, the Economist details conditions outside the stricken plant. “Patrol cars stop passing vehicles,” notes the reporter, “The police are particularly vigilant in preventing unauthorised people getting near the stricken plant.” Meet the Workers

The air of secrecy is compounded when you try to approach workers involved in the nightmarish task of stabilising the nuclear plant. Many are not salaried Tepco staff but low-paid contract workers lodging in Iwaki, just south of the exclusion zone.” “It is easy to spot them, in their nylon tracksuits — They seem to have been recruited from the poorest corners of society”: One calls home from a pay phone because he can’t afford a mobile phone Another has a single front tooth Both are reluctant to talk to journalist (condition of employment is silence) They share their concerns about safety One said he got 30 minutes of safety training He said almost everything he learned about radiation risks came from TV

Conditions On-site Hiroyuki Watanabe, an Iwaki official reports there are “many safety breaches.” “Workers wading through contaminated water complain that their boots have holes in them — Some are not instructed in when to change the filters on their safety masks,” according to Watanabe. “Even such basic tools as wrenches are in short supply, he claims. Tepco is shielded by a lack of media scrutiny. The councillor shows a Tepco gagging order that one local boss had to sign. Article four bans all discussion of the work with outsiders. All requests for media interviews must be rejected.”