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A committee of the Nuclear Safety Commission (NSC) is considering extending the area around nuclear plants where the authorities should be prepared to offer shelter in case of emergency.Currently at about 10 kilometer around the plants, the safety area may be increased to 30 kilometer.Seven months after the beginning of the nuclear crisis, the committee is reviewing the consequences of the March 11 quake and tsunami, in an effort to learn valuable lessons. Japan faced strong criticism for the slow reaction it showed in dealing with the current nuclear crisis.

Another measure which the committee is now considering is to ask the local authorities to be ready to provide iodine tablets to the population on a 50-km radius from plants, to help prevent thyroid cancers from radiation.A draft document with final recommendations will be finalized next month. But it could take years until the guidelines are fully revised, according to an official of the NSC.Around 80,000 people were forced to leave their homes in a 20-km radius area from the Fukushima plant. Some more 30,000 people left from the recommended evacuation zone, between 20 and 30 kilometers around the plant.

Risk below 100 mSv is so low you cannot measure it by Rod Adams on October 15, 2011 in Health Effects, LNT, Nuclear Communications Share48 One of my favorite jokes about the difference between scientists and engineers is the one in which a scientist and an engineer are both put into a room with a pot of gold on the other side. They are given the rules of the challenge – the gold will be given to the person who reaches it first. There is one caveat – each contestant is limited to moving only half way to the goal with each turn. The scientist gives up and claims that the goal is unreachable because the distance to the gold will never be zero. The engineer walks across the room, picks up the pot of gold and says – “I may not be able to get here, but I can get close enough.” During the question and answer session following the presentations at the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) meeting on food safety, Dr. Allison, a life-long scientist, proves that some scientists recognize that close is often good enough. As he says in answer to a lengthy question from the audience, the risk from a dose of 100 mSv each year may not be zero. However, the life span survivor studies of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki show that it is so close to zero that it is impossible to measure. That study included a population of approximately 100,000 people monitored carefully for more than 50 years. It is difficult to conceive of a larger or more well followed study group.

Collectively, Texas eats more energy than any other state, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. We’re fifth in the country when it comes to our per-capita energy intake — about 532 million British Thermal Units per year. A British Thermal Unit, or Btu, is like a little “bite” of energy. Imagine a wooden match burning and you’ve got a Btu on a stick. Of course, the consumption is with reason. Texas, home to a quarter of the U.S. domestic oil reserves, is also bulging with the second-highest population and a serious petrochemical industry. In recent years, we managed to turn ourselves into the country’s top producer of wind energy. Despite all the chest-thumping that goes on in these parts about those West Texas wind farms (hoist that foam finger!), we are still among the worst in how we use that energy. Though not technically “Southern,” Texans guzzle energy like true rednecks. Each of our homes use, on average, about 14,400 kilowatt hours per year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It doesn’t all have to do with the A/C, either. Arizonans, generally agreed to be sharing the heat, typically use about 12,000 kWh a year; New Mexicans cruise in at an annual 7,200 kWh. Don’t even get me started on California’s mere 6,000 kWh/year figure.

Let’s break down that kilowatt-hour thing. A watt is the energy of one candle burning down. (You didn’t put those matches away, did you?) A kilowatt is a thousand burnin’ candles. And a kilowatt hour? I think you can take it from there. We’re wide about the middle in Bexar, too. The average CPS customer used 1,538 kilowatt hours this June when the state average was 1,149 kWh, according to ERCOT. Compare that with Austin residents’ 1,175 kWh and San Marcos residents’ 1,130 kWh, and you start to see something is wrong. So, we’re wasteful. So what? For one, we can’t afford to be. Maybe back when James Dean was lusting under a fountain of crude we had if not reason, an excuse. But in the 1990s Texas became a net importer of energy for the first time. It’s become a habit, putting us behind the curve when it comes to preparing for that tightening energy crush. We all know what happens when growing demand meets an increasingly scarce resource … costs go up. As the pressure drop hits San Anto, there are exactly two ways forward. One is to build another massively expensive power plant. The other is to transform the whole frickin’ city into a de-facto power plant, where energy is used as efficiently as possible and blackouts simply don’t occur.

Consider, South Texas Project Plants 1&2, which send us almost 40 percent of our power, were supposed to cost $974 million. The final cost on that pair ended up at $5.5 billion. If the planned STP expansion follows the same inflationary trajectory, the price tag would wind up over $30 billion. Applications for the Matagorda County plants were first filed with the Atomic Energy Commission in 1974. Building began two years later. However, in 1983 there was still no plant, and Austin, a minority partner in the project, sued Houston Power & Lighting for mismanagement in an attempt to get out of the deal. (Though they tried to sell their share several years ago, the city of Austin remains a 16-percent partner, though they have chosen not to commit to current expansion plans).

Radioactive materials from the damaged Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant reached the Kanto region mainly via two routes, but they largely skirted the heavily populated areas of Tokyo and Kanagawa Prefecture, an expert said. Relatively high levels of radioactive cesium were detected in soil in northern Gunma and Tochigi prefectures and southern Ibaraki Prefecture after the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant was damaged by the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. But contamination was limited in Tokyo and Kanagawa Prefecture, where 22 million people live. Hiromi Yamazawa, a professor of environmental radiology at Nagoya University, said the first radioactive plume moved through Ibaraki Prefecture and turned northward to Gunma Prefecture between late March 14 and the afternoon of March 15.

Large amounts of radioactive materials were released during that period partly because the core of the No. 2 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 plant was exposed. "The soil was likely contaminated after the plume fell to the ground with rain or snow," Yamazawa said, adding that western Saitama Prefecture and western Tokyo may have been also contaminated. Rain fell in Fukushima, Tochigi and Gunma prefectures from the night of March 15 to the early morning of March 16, according to the Meteorological Agency. The second plume moved off Ibaraki Prefecture and passed through Chiba Prefecture between the night of March 21 and the early morning of March 22, when rain fell in a wide area of the Kanto region, according to Yamazawa's estimates.

He said the plume may have created radiation hot spots in coastal and southern areas of Ibaraki Prefecture as well as around Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture. Yamazawa said the plume continued to move southward, without approaching Tokyo or Kanagawa Prefecture, probably because winds flowed toward a low-pressure system south of the Boso Peninsula. "It rained slightly because the low-pressure system was not strong," said Takehiko Mikami, a professor of climatology at Teikyo University. "Contamination in central Tokyo might have been more serious if (the plume) had approached more inland areas." According to calculations by The Asahi Shimbun, about 13,000 square kilometers, or about 3 percent of Japan's land area, including about 8,000 square kilometers in Fukushima Prefecture, have annual exposure levels of 1 millisievert or more.

It has been two years since Mohamed ElBaradei stepped down as head of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, but the Nobel peace laureate still has nuclear technology very much on his mind.

But Mr. ElBaradei doesn't subscribe to the widely held view that Fukushima has killed off the nuclear industry for the foreseeable future. In fact, he argues countries exiting nuclear-power generation are the exception rather than the rule. "There will be, in the short term, a slowdown in some countries. But others like France, India or China [won't see] an impact on their [nuclear] programs," he says.

He also points to some nuclear newcomers, such as the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.

The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March released far more radiation than the Japanese government has claimed. So concludes a study1 that combines radioactivity data from across the globe to estimate the scale and fate of emissions from the shattered plant. The study also suggests that, contrary to government claims, pools used to store spent nuclear fuel played a significant part in the release of the long-lived environmental contaminant caesium-137, which could have been prevented by prompt action. The analysis has been posted online for open peer review by the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Andreas Stohl, an atmospheric scientist with the Norwegian Institute for Air Research in Kjeller, who led the research, believes that the analysis is the most comprehensive effort yet to understand how much radiation was released from Fukushima Daiichi. "It's a very valuable contribution," says Lars-Erik De Geer, an atmospheric modeller with the Swedish Defense Research Agency in Stockholm, who was not involved with the study. The reconstruction relies on data from dozens of radiation monitoring stations in Japan and around the world. Many are part of a global network to watch for tests of nuclear weapons that is run by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna. The scientists added data from independent stations in Canada, Japan and Europe, and then combined those with large European and American caches of global meteorological data.

Stohl cautions that the resulting model is far from perfect. Measurements were scarce in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima accident, and some monitoring posts were too contaminated by radioactivity to provide reliable data. More importantly, exactly what happened inside the reactors — a crucial part of understanding what they emitted — remains a mystery that may never be solved. "If you look at the estimates for Chernobyl, you still have a large uncertainty 25 years later," says Stohl. Nevertheless, the study provides a sweeping view of the accident. "They really took a global view and used all the data available," says De Geer.

Scanning the Earth Project (environmental scanning project) is a project to provide environmental information, including the radiation dose. Currently, SafeCast has collected together with data. In this research project, fixed sensors and mobile sensors and sensing in the human living space, build a platform to share sensor data using information technology. In addition, I developed a data visualization techniques and spatial interpolation techniques in order to provide comprehensive information across time and space. Specifically, we are conducting, including fixed-point observation and instrumentation sensors installed radiation dose measurement method using a goal for automobiles and promote the creation of a sustainable platform for radiation information. Sensing information is stored in the server via the Internet, will be open to the public through the Web API. At the same time, the space-time analysis of information technology sensors will be widely available on the portal site with information visualized.

This study includes the following research areas such as big. 1. Development of Networked Sensing Devices Network development, such as sensing devices to measure radiation dose and weather information. At the same time defining a data dictionary to collect information for a variety of ground and develop a mechanism for device authentication. We also recommend the standardization of communication protocols used by the device. 2. Development of Sensor Network Development of network technology to collect data measured by the sensor. DTN protocols and collecting data of the type used in sensing movement sensor, developed a protocol for cooperation between the server and advance the standards. 3. Development of spatial analysis There is a limit to the fixed sensors and mobile sensors laying. In order to cover the space, so we developed a technique to interpolate between the measurement point information on the characteristics of each based on the information. Also, consider the API to provide their information widely. 4. The development of visualization techniques

In order to take advantage of human-sensing data is essential for meaningful visualization. In addition, the information should not be sensing a zero-dimensional visualization, visualization should not be one-dimensional, not to be visible in two dimensions, not to be visualized in three dimensions The variety of such. In this Purujeku and the visualization techniques we devised according to the characteristics of each space. Contact ste-info_at_sfc.wide.ad.jp