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[On March 12]  “It’s a core meltdown. We believe the fuel has started to melt [in the No. 1 reactor],” Koichiro Nakamura of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said at a press conference at 2 p.m. [On March 14] Nakamura did an about-face only two days after his initial statement: – “We can’t say for certain whether there’s been a meltdown” According to research results announced by TEPCO in May: – Most of the fuel at the No. 1 reactor had melted by the morning of March 12 – This means Nakamura’s initial explanation was correct

Finally admitted on June 7 there had been a meltdown Nov. 30 [Tepco said of Unit 1]: – “Almost all of the (68 tons of) nuclear fuel melted, fell through a pressure vessel and eroded the concrete bottom of the containment vessel by up to 65 centimeters” Therefore, a meltdown had advanced in the reactor core and this fact was hidden from the public for about three months

Explaining why the agency’s information had undergone such a change, Terasaka said: “After the Prime Minister’s Office’s instruction, we became very cautious about using the term ‘meltdown.’ We felt our statements should not exceed what the Prime Minister’s Office said at press conferences.”

It has been 208 days since the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. The casualty count from atomic radiation is today exactly what it was the day before the Great East Japan Earthquake launched a tsunami that killed thousands and wrecked three reactors at the nuclear plant. That is, the number of radiation casualties is still zero. On May 13, sixty-three days after the quake and tsunami hit, John Boice, a professor of Radiation Epidemiology at Vanderbilt University, told a U.S. congressional committee why.

This is something that a lot of people (including me; see article) predicted on the first day of the nuclear situation. Nuclear meltdowns have never lived up to their pop-culture billing. The three major meltdowns in the history of the nuclear age—Chalk River in 1952, Three Mile Island in 1979, and of course Fukushima—resulted in zero casualties and negligible environmental damage. This is because they simply did not release enough radiation to kill anyone or harm the environment. Nevertheless, the term “nuclear meltdown” holds irresistible drawing power for media headline writers. Why is this? Because very few people understand nuclear radiation, much less its units of measure. So when faced with a barrage of reporting about radiation measurements—expressed in terms of picocuries, becquerels, rads, and microsieverts—most people have no way of evaluating that information. Therefore it all sounds kind of scary.

This may be why Dr. Boice also told the representatives this: There is a pressing need to learn more about the health consequences of radiation in humans when exposures are spread over time at low levels and not received briefly at high doses such as in atomic bomb survivors. When he gives radiation measurements, Dr. Boice oscillates between common and international (SI) units. When describing radioactivity, e.g. in bananas, he uses becquerels (SI units). When describing absorbed dose measurements, Dr. Boice uses millirems, which are common units. Most people use sieverts to describe absorbed dose. To convert millirems to microsieverts, multiply by ten. Click here for an excellent web-based radiation unit coverter.

The top civilian nuclear disasters, ranked by International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. Worst Civilian Nuclear Disasters 1. Chernobyl, Soviet Union (now Ukraine) April 26, 1986 INES Rating: 7 (major impact on people and environment)

The worst nuclear disaster of all time resulted from a test of the reactor’s systems. A power surge while the safety systems were shut down resulted in the dreaded nuclear meltdown. Fuel elements ruptured and a violent explosion rocked the facility. Fuel rods meted and the graphite covering the reactor burned. Authorities reported that 56 have died as a direct result of the disaster—47 plant workers and nine children who died of thyroid disease. However, given the Soviet Union’s tendency to cover up unfavorable information, that number likely is low.  International Atomic Energy Agency reports estimate that the death toll may ultimately be as high as 4,000. The World Health Organization claims that it’s as high as 9,000. In addition to the deaths, 200,000 people had to be permanently relocated after the disaster. The area remains unsuitable for human habitation. 2. Fukushima, Japan March 11, 2011 INES Rating: 7 (major impact on people and environment) Following a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami, Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power facility suffered a series of ongoing equipment failures accompanied by the release of nuclear material into the air. The death toll for this currently is at two but is expected to rise and as of April 2011, the crisis still ongoing. A 12 mile evacuation area has been established around the plant.

3. Kyshtym, Soviet Union Sept. 29, 1957 INES Rating: 6 (serious impact on people and environment) Poor construction is blamed for the September 1957 failure of this nuclear plant. Although there was no meltdown or nuclear explosion, a radioactive cloud escaped from the plant and spread for hundreds of miles. Soviet reports say that 10,000 people were evacuated, and 200 deaths were cause by cancer.

Cathode Long “rings of the capital of contaminated food の と の radioactivity terror”, Weekly Asahi, September 23, 2011:

Google Translation Meltdown temperature of the fuel in nuclear reactors in Fukushima in March, therefore, far more than 2000 ℃, had been considered from 4000 ℃ to 3000 ℃. Boiling point, 184 ℃ and iodine, 671 ℃ cesium, strontium since 1382 ℃, radioactive materials are dangerous, but far beyond the temperature was almost entirely vaporized. Even the plutonium, the boiling point is lower than 1400 ℃ 3228 ℃ than molybdenum. If so, of course, strontium and plutonium are particularly significant influence on internal exposure, and was released to the mass gasification, I believe. Translation of Asahi report via Fukushima Diary:

Science journalist Hirose Takashi In March, fuel rods started meltdown in the reactor.They became hot as 4000℃, which is hot enough to make most of the radioactive material evaporated. Especially plutonium and strontium were evaporated, spread around as gas. [...]

Nuclear reactors are operated by fallible human beings, and at least two meltdowns have been caused by poor human decisions: the 1961 meltdown of an experimental military reactor in Idaho, which killed three operators when one of them withdrew a control rod six times as far as he was supposed to (carrying out a high-tech murder-suicide over a love triangle, according to some accounts), and the Chernobyl accident, which was caused by an ill-conceived experiment conducted outside approved protocols.

So, if nuclear safety is a matter of human behavior as well as sound technical infrastructure, we should look to the social sciences in addition to engineering to improve reactor safety. After all, the machines don't run themselves. The social sciences have five lessons for us here: The blind spot. In what we might call the frog-in-boiling-water syndrome, human cognition is such that, in the absence of a disaster, individuals often filter out accumulating indications of safety problems that look like obvious red flags in retrospect -- just as frogs do not jump out of a pot of water on a stove as long as the temperature goes up slowly. Diane Vaughan's award-winning book on the Challenger disaster demonstrates a clear pattern in earlier space shuttle launches of O-ring performance degrading in proportion to declining launch temperatures -- the problem that would ultimately kill Challenger's ill-fated crew. Some shuttle engineers had become concerned about this, but the organizational complex responsible for the space shuttle could not bring this problem into full cognitive focus as long as the missions were successful. Operational success created a blinding glow that made this safety issue hard to see.

The whistle-blower's dilemma. The space shuttle program provides another example of human fallibility, explored in William Langewische's account of the Columbia space shuttle accident: Large, technical organizations tend to be unfriendly to employees who harp on safety issues. The NASA engineers who warned senior management -- correctly, as it turned out -- that the Columbia shuttle was endangered by the foam it lost on takeoff were treated as pests. (The same is true of Roger Boisjoly, the Morton Thiokol engineer who was ostracized and punished for having warned correctly that the Challenger shuttle was likely to explode if launched at low temperature.) Large technical organizations prioritize meeting deadlines and fulfilling production targets, and their internal reward structures tend to reflect these priorities. This is especially true if the organizations operate in a market environment where revenue streams are at stake. In such organizations, bonuses tend not to go to those who cause the organization to miss targets and deadlines or spend extra money to prevent accidents that may seem hypothetical. It is not the safety engineers, after all, who become CEOs. Those with safety concerns report that they often censor themselves unless they are deeply convinced of the urgency of their cause. Indeed, there is -- sadly -- substantial literature on the various forms of mistreatment of engineers who do come forward with such concerns.

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.

Impact Seen As Roughly Comparable to Radiation-Related Deaths After Chernobyl; Infants Are Hardest Hit, With Continuing Research Showing Even Higher Possible Death Count

An estimated 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, according to a major new article in the December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services. This is the first peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal documenting the health hazards of Fukushima.Authors Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman note that their estimate of 14,000 excess U.S. deaths in the 14 weeks after the Fukushima meltdowns is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths in the 17 weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.

The rise in reported deaths after Fukushima was largest among U.S. infants under age one. The 2010-2011 increase for infant deaths in the spring was 1.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 8.37 percent in the preceding 14 weeks.The IJHS article will be published Tuesday and will be available online as of 11 a.m. EST at http://www.radiation.org . Just six days after the disastrous meltdowns struck four reactors at Fukushima on March 11, scientists detected the plume of toxic fallout had arrived over American shores. Subsequent measurements by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found levels of radiation in air, water, and milk hundreds of times above normal across the U.S. The highest detected levels of Iodine-131 in precipitation in the U.S. were as follows (normal is about 2 picocuries I-131 per liter of water): Boise, ID (390); Kansas City (200); Salt Lake City (190); Jacksonville, FL (150); Olympia, WA (125); and Boston, MA (92)

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.  

This video clip is from the Q&A session after the lecture by an actor-and-anti-nuke-activist Taro Yamada (man on the right), at the “National Forum of School Lunch” held in Sapporo City on November 6、2011. The death of the member of the special rescue unit of the Fire Department, whom the questioner in the video is talking about, hasn’t been confirmed officially nor reported in MSM. The person called “Dr. Sakiyama” in the video is Dr. Hisako Sakiyama, a specialist in radiation exposure at Takagi School and ex-chief researcher at National Institute of Radiological Sciences. She was a researcher at MIT before working for the Institute. Translation and captioning by tokyobrowntabby.

Transcript Excerpts On October 26, a friend of mine in Osaka passed away. He was a rescue squad member and had been sent to work in disaster-affected areas for a long time, such as Iwate or Fukushima. In July, he was found to have been internally exposed to radiation. All his team members had been, too. But their mission didn’t end. [...] Eventually they got sick and realized they couldn’t continue their duties any more. All the team members including him quit the rescue squad. Before they quit, they had been berated by their supervisors as unpatriotic. In a little more than 3 months since his internal exposure was found in July, my friend vomited blood frequently and finally died of renal failure.

About renal failure after a nuclear catastrophe (via study): The main pathologies in both districts [near the Chernobyl meltdown] were anemia of pregnancy, renal disorders, transient hypertension, and abnormalities of fat metabolism.

There are battles being fought on two fronts in the five months since a massive earthquake and tsunami damaged the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. On one front, there is the fight to repair the plant, operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and to contain the extent of contamination caused by the damage. On the other is the public’s fight to extract information from the Japanese government, TEPCO and nuclear experts worldwide.

The latter battle has yielded serious official humiliation, resulting high-profile resignations, scandals, and promises of reform in Japan’s energy industry whereas the latter has so far resulted in a storm of anger and mistrust. Even most academic nuclear experts, seen by many as the middle ground between the anti-nuclear activists and nuclear lobby itself, were reluctant to say what was happening: That in Fukushima, a community of farms, schools and fishing ports, was experiencing a full-tilt meltdown, and that, as Al Jazeera reported in June, that the accident had most likely caused more radioactive contamination than Chernobyl

As recently as early August, those seeking information on the real extent of the damage at the Daiichi plant and on the extent of radioactive contamination have mostly been reassured by the nuclear community that there’s no need to worry.

SOURCE: Cesium surges in ash halt Kashiwa incinerator, Japan Times by HIROKO NAKATA, October 6, 2011 An incinerator in Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture, has been shut down following the discovery of high levels of radioactive cesium in incinerated ash, a city official said Thursday in the first such case since the March nuclear meltdowns [...] Kashiwa stopped the operation at the Nanbu center, one of the city’s two waste disposal facilities, on Sept. 7 after the city found in late June that its incinerated ash contained 70,800 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram — higher than the national limit of 8,000 becquerels for landfill. [...]

Entire area of major city 60km from Fukushima meltdown to be decontaminated — Officials expect process may take 20 years

Fukushima to decontaminate entire city, Yomiuri Shimbun, July 14, 2011

he Fukushima municipal government likely will decontaminate the city’s entire area in response to the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, according to city government sources. [...] Fear of radioactive contamination is widespread among the city’s residents as radiation levels in some areas of the city have been confirmed as higher than those within the 20-kilometer-radius no-entry zone surrounding the nuclear power plant. [...] The city government expects it will take at least several years–and possibly close to 20–to decontaminate the whole city. [...] Wikipedia: As of 2003, the city has an estimated population of 290,866 [...] Fukushima City is about 63 kilometres (39 miles) north-west of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.

After Fukushima, the Chinese governement have decided to finance the development of the much safer Thorium Fuelled Molten Salt Reactor - this way of producing energy is far safer than Pressure Water Reactor - it does not need pressure and there is no meltdown possibility at all. Further Thorium reactors cannot be used to make nuclear bombs.

Thorium is as common as lead, and should have been chosen after the war.At the end of the 2nd World War war plutonium was needed to make nuclear bombs, and this was the main reason for taking the PWR route, because Thorium reactors cannot. Edward Teller - the designer of the atomic bomb - on his death bed - said that a Thorium Fuelled Molten Salt Reactor was a safer design and that the basic Thorium fuel more available than Uranium. He was working on a paper for this type of reactor at his death (see below).

It would cost about 1 billion to design a Thorium reactor (Twitter is valued at 7 billion).

A leading Japanese journalist recently made two incredible claims about the Fukushima power plant that suffered a nuclear meltdown in March 2011, sending shockwaves around the world. First, the former editor of a national newspaper in Japan says the U.S. and Israel knew Fukushima had weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that were exposed to the atmosphere after a massive tsunami wave hit the reactor. Second, he  contends that Israeli intelligence sabotaged the reactor in retaliation for Japan’s support of an independent Palestinian state. According to Yoishi Shimatsu, a former editor of Japan Times Weekly, these nuclear materials were shipped to the plant in 2007 on the orders of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, with the connivance of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The shipment was in the form of warhead cores secretly removed from the U.S. nuclear warheads facility BWXT Plantex near Amarillo, Texas. While acting as the middleman, Israel transported warheads from the port of Houston, and in the process kept the best ones while giving the Japanese older warhead cores that had to be further enriched at Fukushima.

Shimatsu credits retired CIA agent and mercenary Roland Vincent Carnaby with learning the warheads were being transported from Houston. In a strange twist, Carnaby was mysteriously shot dead less than a year later by Houston police at a traffic stop. He was shot once in the back and once in the chest. He did not have a weapon in his hands. Intelligence sources said he had been tracking a Mossad unit that was smuggling U.S. plutonium out of Houston docks for an Israeli nuclear reactor. In an even more explosive charge, the journalist says that 20 minutes before the Fukushima plant’s nuclear meltdown, Israel was so upset with Japanese support for a Palestinian declaration of statehood that it double-crossed Japan by unleashing the Stuxnet virus on the plant’s  computers. The virus hampered the shutdown, leading to fallout from a section of the plant housing uranium and plutonium retrieved from the warheads supplied in 2007.

While it is impossible to verify some of Shimatsu’s claims, there was a massive cover-up at the time of the Fukushima disaster in March.  Explosions at the site were immediately downplayed. While it was subsequently reported that three reactors suffered meltdowns, Japanese authorities tried to rate the disaster as a Level 4 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, although outside experts declared it a 7, which is the highest level. Something worth noting is how in 2009, two years after Shimatsu says the warheads were secretly moved to Japan, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a veiled warning to Japan not to abandon its anti-nuclear weapons policy. The IAEA had to know, however, that Japan has long retained the potential to build nuclear weapons. That was made clear as far back as 1996 when a leaked Ministry of Foreign Affairs document exposed how Japan had been promoting a dual strategy in respect to nuclear weapons since the mid-1960s. It would often publicly profess a non-nuclear policy while maintaining the ability to build a nuclear arsenal. The Liberal Democratic Party, which has dominated Japanese politics, has always said there is no constitutional impediment to nukes.

A leading Japanese journalist recently made two incredible claims about the Fukushima power plant that suffered a nuclear meltdown in March 2011, sending shockwaves around the world. First, the former editor of a national newspaper in Japan says the U.S. and Israel knew Fukushima had weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that were exposed to the atmosphere after a massive tsunami wave hit the reactor.

Second, he contends that Israeli intelligence sabotaged the reactor in retaliation for Japan's support of an independent Palestinian state. According to Yoishi Shimatsu, a former editor of Japan Times Weekly, these nuclear materials were shipped to the plant in 2007 on the orders of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, with the connivance of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

The shipment was in the form of warhead cores secretly removed from the U.S. nuclear warheads facility BWXT Plantex near Amarillo, Texas. While acting as the middleman, Israel transported warheads from the port of Houston, and in the process kept the best ones while giving the Japanese older warhead cores that had to be further enriched at Fukushima. Shimatsu credits retired CIA agent and mercenary Roland Vincent Carnaby with learning the warheads were being transported from Houston. In a strange twist, Carnaby was mysteriously shot dead less than a year later by Houston police at a traffic stop.