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Light radioactive gases are being released in steam from the turbine building.

Reda is participating in her first mission to India since becoming GEH’s CEO in July 2010

“Exports are leading the U.S. economic recovery, spurring future economic growth and creating jobs in America,” Locke said when the administration first announced its plans for the trade mission in late 2010. “Increasing trade between the U.S. and India will help drive innovation and create jobs in both countries. As trading partners, U.S. companies can help India meet the ambitious economic and social goals laid out by its government, while the Indian market holds enormous potential for U.S. exporters.”

Joining Reda for GE is Timothy Richards, GE Energy’s managing director for energy policy and a veteran of several previous missions to India. Those previous missions focused on civilian nuclear cooperation as a means to help modernize India’s industrial infrastructure and support future economic growth.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) on June 6 revised the level of radioactivity of materials emitted from the crisis hit Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant from 370,000 terabecquerels to 850,000 terabecquerels. (from 10,000,000 curies to 22,972,972.97 curies)http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110606p2a00m0na009000c.html

Lots of interesting information in this paper from TEPCO:http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/images/handouts_110525_01-e.pdfUnits 1-4 did not have RCIC.  They had isolation condensers.  Not only that, the isolation condensers were water cooled with 8 hours of water in the condenser reservoir. 

HPCI required DC power to operate.  The turbine lube oil pump was DC; it didn't have a shaft oil pump.  I think this may be common here too, anyone willing to verify that?That's why they had trouble so quick:  8 hours later and without AC power they had no way to get water to the pressure vessel.  About the same time the instruments died from a lack of battery power is about the time they lost the isolation condenser from a lack of water.They also verify that they didn't have the hardened vent modification.

Fukushima may have a group that could tackle the nuclear crisis looming over Japan. The Skilled Veterans Corps, retired engineers and professionals, want to volunteer to work in the dangerous conditions instead of putting younger generations at risk. More than 200 Japanese retirees are seeking to replace younger workers at Fukushima while the plant is being stabilized. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/307378

So helpless were the plant's engineers that, as dusk fell after Japan's devastating March 11 quake and tsunami, they were forced to scavenge flashlights from nearby homes. They pulled batteries from cars not washed away by the tsunami in a desperate effort to revive reactor gauges that weren't working properly. The plant's complete power loss contributed to a failure of relief vents on a dangerously overheating reactor, forcing workers to open valves by hand.And in a significant miscalculation: At first, engineers weren't aware that the plant's emergency batteries were barely working, the investigation found—giving them a false impression that they had more time to make repairs. As a result, nuclear fuel began melting down hours earlier than previously assumed. This week Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, confirmed that one of the plant's six reactors suffered a substantial meltdown early in Day 1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704322804576302553455643510.html

The following article focus's on US spent fuel storage safety, Several members of Congress are calling for the fuel to be moved from the pools into dry casks at a faster clip, noting that the casks are thought to be capable of withstanding an earthquake or a plane crash, they have no moving parts and they require no electricity. but there is a reference to Fukishima's dry storage casks farther into the article.But Robert Alvarez, a former senior adviser to the secretary of energy and expert on nuclear power, points out that unlike the fuel pools, dry casks survived the tsunami at Fukushima unscathed. “They don’t get much attention because they didn’t fail,” he said.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/business/energy-environment/06cask.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ref=science

In 1967, Tepco chopped 25 meters off the 35-meter natural seawall where the reactors were to be located, according to documents filed at the time with Japanese authorities. That little-noticed action was taken to make it easier to ferry equipment to the site and pump seawater to the reactors. It was also seen as an efficient way to build the complex atop the solid base of bedrock needed to better protect the plant from earthquakes.But the razing of the cliff also placed the reactors five meters below the level of 14- to 15-meter tsunami hitting the plant March 11, triggering a major nuclear disaster resulting in the meltdown of three reactor cores.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303982504576425312941820794.html

Toyota was a key executive who was involved in the Fukushima No. 1 plant construction.It is actually common practice to build primary nuclear plant facilities directly on bedrock because of the temblor factor.Toyota also cited two other reasons for Tepco clearing away the bluff — seawater pumps used to provide coolant water needed to be set up on the ground up to 10 meters from the sea, and extremely heavy equipment, including the 500-ton reator pressure vessels, were expected to be brought in by boat.In fact, Tepco decided to build the plant on low ground based on a cost-benefit calculation of the operating costs of the seawater pumps, according to two research papers separately written by senior Tepco engineers in the 1960s.

If the seawater pumps were placed on high ground, their operating costs would be accordingly higher."We decided to build the plant at ground level after comparing the ground construction costs and operating costs of the circulation water pumps," wrote Hiroshi Kaburaki, then deputy head of the Tepco's construction office at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, in the January 1969 edition of Hatsuden Suiryoku, a technical magazine on power plants.Still, Tepco believed ground level was "high enough to sufficiently secure safety against tsunami and typhoon waves," wrote Seiji Saeki, then civil engineering section head of Tepco's construction office, in his research paper published in October 1967.

Engineers at Tohoku Electric Power Co., on the other hand, had a different take on the tsunami threat when the Onagawa nuclear plant was built in Miyagi Prefecture in the 1980s.Like Fukushima, the plant was built along the Tohoku coast and was hit by tsunami as high as 13 meters on March 11.Before building the plant, Tohoku Electric, examining historic records of tsunami reported in the region, conducted computer simulations and concluded the local coast could face tsumani of up to 9.1 meters.Tohoku Electric had set the construction ground level at 14.8 meters above sea level — which barely spared the Onagawa plant from major damage from 13-meter-high tsunami that hit in March.

Former Tepco worker Naganuma said many locals now feel they have been duped by Tepco's long-running propaganda on the safety of its nuclear facilities, despite the huge economic benefits the plant brought to his hometown of Okuma, which hosts the Fukushima No. 1 plant.

The higher the TFR number, the more the population will grow and expand. On the other hand, a TFR number below 2 kids per woman means the population is shrinking for the next generation. Nuclear weaponeers who know about these things say it is impossible for a society to recover, or grow again, with a TFR below 1.3 kids per woman. In short, that society is doomed. Japan’s TFR plummeted to 1.2 since the detonation of the two 10,000 lb sperm and ovary destroying uranium poison gas bombs in August, 1945.

A few weeks after the atomic bombing, Australian journalist George Weller managed to sneak into occupied Japan and nuked Nagasaki in spite of US Army General Douglas MacArthur’s prohibition. Weller, an experienced war correspondent, was utterly stunned at the extent of the other worldly devastation and killing of the Atomic Bomb. Mr. Weller coined the term “Atomic Plague” which then swept around the world on a wave of revulsion at what the Americans had done. Diplomats and other people politically or militarily in-the-know knew the Japanese were eager to surrender and that President Truman lied in his bull shit speech about the Atomic Bomb “saving American lives” that would be forfeit if the US were to invade Japan.

What’s more, the dominant owners of the NYT, the Sultzberger family, like it that way. The family has had a slash and burn radiation policy ever since Hiroshima in 1945. No Lie was too Big, in fact, the Bigger and more Bizarre the better. Germany’s WWII Fuhrer Adolph Hitler may have coined the concept “The Big Lie;” but, the New York Times spun it out to a degree that would make even Hitler proud.

The Radiation Warfare Committee controlled Manhattan Project to build the Atomic Bomb got its name from its organizer, the Manhattan Engineering District of the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Sultzbergers’ NY Times was only too eager to help the fledgling CIA and the US War Department lie about the nuke bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan that incinerated hundreds of thousands of people. Many were literally vaporized into nothingness. The Big Lie Lives On with the NY Times

The coming Fuku Kid Disaster and Fuku Kill Off First and foremost will be the ever nasty New York Times (NYT.) When it comes to something really, vitally important to all our futures, our families and friends, we can always count on the NYT to lie through their teeth for the nuclear industry criminals and mass murderers. That is nothing new for the Times, they always have.

The six devastated US Navy/GE reactors at Fukushima Daiichi finished the Kill Truman ordered 65 years, 7 months, and 6 days later on March 3, 2011. Sayonara, Japan, you are history. “Who’s Next?” Good question. There are 438 big reactors, just stationary nuclear weapons really, in the world. 104 big nuke reactors are in America and many, like the Fuku reactors,  are by the sea due to the exorbitant, one billion gallons a day water demand of the reactors. Even the inland reactors are exquisitely vulnerable to becoming another Fukushima. If any lose electricity and off site feeds, a Fuku type meltdown is guaranteed.

The people in the Japanese NHK TV video below live in Northern Japan. They must evacuate and many are dying. Many won’t leave, preferring Denial as the better course to reality and Evacuation. After all, you can’t see, feel, hear or taste radiation as it liquefies your insides. Any of us could be next.

The US Military and probably Russia’s Military, the former Soviet Union, possess weapons that can accomplish this kind of devastation. They should, at least the US has devoted billions to controlling what the DOD calls “earth processes” for 60 years. That would be your basic hurricanes, tornadoes, rain, drought, earthquakes, tsunamis, rogue waves and volcanoes. Even a medium sized tropical storm, not even big enough to be a hurricane or typhoon, contains as much energy as 10,000 Hiroshima sized Atomic Bombs. If the War Department, later renamed to the Department of Defense to confuse the do-gooders, could control the weather or “Earth Processes” they would control the world. That’s the long held dream of Psychos and control freaks everywhere.

They identified about 285 experts nearing retirement and others with few experienced workers to someday replace them in such fields as power plant construction inspection and fire protection."That information that is in short supply that is walking out the door, we call this high-risk, high-value knowledge," Hudson said.NRC estimates it loses 4,000 work years of experience every year through attrition and retirement.

"You can put in place the tools [and] infrastructure that allows rapid capture and transfer of knowledge, but what it really comes down to is organization culture," and agency leaders must support development of knowledge management initiatives, said Andre, now a senior vice president for intelligence business strategies at CACI.Leaders must not only say they value knowledge sharing or continuous learning, they must reward behaviors that reflect those values, Andre said.

The two resignations came after a meeting of the AEC committee on July 29, in which Lin presented a 5,000-word report on the ongoing construction of the planned Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao District of New Taipei City, northern Taiwan. Lin warned in the report, written in Chinese, that the construction project has many structural flaws, including those in the unique digital control system which employs nearly 40,000 signal detectors.

The way its builder, the state-run Taiwan Power Company (Taipower), has hired contractors was also "unique," Lin said, revealing that many of the contractors have never built nuclear power plants. At the construction site, supervision almost did not exist, he added. Furthermore, h

Construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant began in 1999. It was scheduled to begin commercial operations before the end of 2011 but Taipwer has announced the commercial run won't be possible until 2012. Lin's report led the July meeting to produce a resolution that the construction mu

n an interview this week with Global Security Newswire, the high-level Energy Department official said that discussions have focused on an array of potential nuclear energy market roles for Mongolia, from mining its substantial uranium reserves to fabricating fuel and more. However, the unofficial talks have not broached the idea of Mongolia becoming a recipient of foreign-origin spent fuel, the senior figure said. "I never thought about U.S. spent fuel. Never," the Energy official said. "I never even thought about it, much less discussed it." The Obama administration generally supports the idea of creating international operations for waste storage and other fuel-cycle functions that might help stem global nuclear proliferation, but "what the Mongolian government and the Mongolian people end up deciding they want to do is completely their decision and I would not dream of imposing our views on that," the senior official said. "There's no discussion of an international spent-fuel repository," added a second Energy Department official who participated in the same interview. "What has been included as part of the comprehensive fuel services discussions are potential long-term storage of Mongolian-origin used fuel that has Mongolian uranium [in it]."

Adding Value An evolving concept of nuclear fuel "leasing" would have the Mongolians build on their existing uranium ore resources to ultimately provide reactor-ready fuel to foreign nations and, additionally, stand ready to take back used uranium fuel rods once they are depleted, according to reports. The idea, said the more junior Energy official, is that Mongolia could "potentially add long-term storage as part of the value of that uranium resource to potential buyers." Even if foreign-origin spent fuel cannot be stored in Mongolia, the nation's talks with its international partners might yet allow for U.S., Japanese or other companies to build facilities in the Central Asian nation to produce Mongolian fuel for sale abroad, which could later be returned to Ulaanbaatar for storage after it is used.